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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (74045)	1/19/2000 3:35:00 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 132070

Look at the bright side. With the internet, they can help keep prices in check in an economy with -1.5% inflation rate. They're instituting policies mimicking a lot of what the US does --- 401k's insituted in 2001, institute freer immigration policy by 2005 for service industries, ...

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (74045)	1/19/2000 4:14:00 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Skeeter, I know less than nothing about the specific values in Japan, but I do have a few insights. Both interest rates and return on equity are very low in Japan. There's also a lot of valuable cross equity holdings that don't make their way to the income statement. I suspect that under conditions like that, high PEs might be less scary than they look. It's sort of like paying up for the depressed earnings of a company with extra hidden value. I saw some replacement cost data that suggests that Japan is less overvalued than most countries based on Tobin's Q. Japan just needs a serious recovery and more of a focus on ROE and the values are not too crazy when viewed from a longer-term perspective. Wayne