OT
A fun read on Japan....
JAPANESE ECONOMY
Monster Problems
Japan is getting pretty scary. So is the U.S. in for a fright?
FORTUNE
Monday, April 2, 2001
By Bill Powell
Suicide in Osaka
In the world's second-largest economy, people don't spend a whole lot of time blathering about soft landings, hard landings, or anything in between. And the reason is really quite simple. In Japan, as Robert Feldman, the chief economist there for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, puts it, "Our plane doesn't have a pilot, and it's completely out of gas anyway." And, he might have added, it's been that way for quite some time.
Even after all these years it is truly stupefying to behold what is happening in Japan. The Land of the Rising Sun disappeared behind the dark side of the moon more than a decade ago and, incredibly, has yet to emerge. To the contrary, it now appears to be floating off helplessly into a deflationary black hole from which no one has a clue as to when it might return. Hard though it may be to imagine now, there was a time when the rest of the world regarded Japan's economic planners with admiration, if not awe. They were, after all, the architects of the postwar economic miracle. But in the 1990s, year after year of economic futility meant those same bureaucrats accomplished something almost as remarkable: They turned a seemingly irrepressible economy into a nearly irrelevant one. By the year 2000, Japan wasn't a juggernaut, it was a joke--the Generalissimo Francisco Franco of developed nations, still dead after all these years.
fortune.com |
