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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Adams who wrote (41213)	11/11/2003 6:01:13 PM
From: Mark Adams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Wow. 127 million pop for Japan- 1/2 that of the US. China at 10x, not 100x. www9.ocn.ne.jp Yet another Mea Culpa. Check out that India+China. Dwarfs Japan+US+EuroZone. 10 trillion savings/127 million pop -> hmm. 10,000 billion / .127 billion -> $78,740/pop. That must be a bit more than triple the 'networth' of Canadian citizens. But we don't really know if that 10 trillion is Japanese networth, since we don't have the source. All we have is a chestnut- Postal savings no less. Back to the search of OECD data. A quick scan last night of a recent OECD paper on Ageing and Savings proved a bit of a bust. Lots of info for policy makers, but very little I can use to support my thesis. www1.oecd.org You'll be happy to know that policy makers understand social programs may unintended effects. For example, some kinds of public funding (ie Social Security) may result in more elder's living independently, defeating the intrafamily wealth transfer effect which occurs when families remerge. Meaning your parents won't have to move in with you if they have a chance at living independently, but I'm not sure I read closely enough to see if the paper actually said that. The paper did reveal the Japanese tend to work longer, and tend to have larger households. ie the kids live at home until marraige, at say 30. Thus cultural factors may contribute to a higher savings rate. Chart 2.12 (Market wealth to gross income ratio) Chart 5.1 (Ratio of retirees to employees, trends) Chart 6.1 (% of GDP expended on retirement related prgms over 80-97 period) Table A.15 (PPP production worker wages for 9 countries) are somewhat interesting, as is the early stuff in section two on household sizes. I happened on a chart somewhere of Japanese household debt. At 140% of personal disposable income, it likely exceeds the entire OECD group. For sure Canada and the US. Maybe there is a lesson there: debt to income ratios are higher in cohorts with higher levels of 'wealth'. But that comparison of a 'stock' and a 'flow' sorta already got beat to death last week.