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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shades who wrote (59890)	4/30/2006 1:21:45 AM
From: ild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

ZIRP works for me. USD will crash, gold will be $10,000 and I will sell my DROOPY shares for $100. DROOPY will go much higher, but I'll sell for $100.

To: shades who wrote (59890)	4/30/2006 9:22:13 AM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Respond to of 110194

do we want a Japan style solution? Airports are crowding Japan's skies By Bruce Wallace, Los Angeles Times \| April 30, 2006 TOKYO -- The $3 billion Kobe airport has been open for just two months, but already there are lines of planes waiting to take off and land. In the first weeks of operation, air traffic controllers were forced to order a high number of incoming flights to circle the airport so that planes on the ground would get safely in the air. The Kobe facility is the third major airport in a 25-mile radius. The crowded skies over Osaka Bay are a symptom of a wider problem of scattered airports that is turning Japan, once the biggest hub in Asia, into a destination that international air travelers increasingly avoid. In a country with so many airports competing with one another, critics are asking just how many airports Japan can sustain. The country has 97 airports, and more are coming. In the past decade of dismal economic growth, municipalities and prefectures continued to cut ribbons on new airports at a breathless pace. Many had been planned during bubble economy of the 1980s, fueled by passenger projections that turned out to be wildly unrealistic when Japan's economy stalled. Many of those airports now struggle to break even. The proliferation of airports has not resulted in lower prices for consumers. In a country of 126 million highly mobile people, transportation remains expensive, whether by plane, train, or automobile. Unlike Europe, where discount airlines have made it cheap to fly about the continent, Japan has no discount airline to undercut the two main carriers, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways. Japan's problem, analysts say, is that airports have been built to satisfy the desire of local politicians to showcase an airport in their backyard, without much thought to integrating Japan's highly efficient rail system with the network of international and domestic flights. The result is that Japan's airline industry is struggling in the midst of an Asian boom. ''Local politics is hijacking good sense," said Anthony Concil, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association. Concil came to his job with 17 years of experience in the Japanese airline industry. He said that Japan's most overriding need is to increase capacity and to improve access to Narita Airport, the 22-year-old international hub airport that struggles to serve the massive Tokyo metropolitan area of almost 30 million. Derided by travelers as too hard to get to, and by airlines for having the most expensive landing fees in the world, Narita has been surpassed as an Asian gateway by state-of-the-art airports in Singapore and Hong Kong. Once Asia's busiest airport for international travelers, Narita has fallen to fourth, with Seoul just behind and growing almost four times as quickly, according to the Airports International Council. ''Narita hasn't kept up; there's a lid on traffic into the airport," Concil said. ''They still have a capacity problem at Narita, and building more airports in the countryside isn't going to solve that." But the money is still being funneled to regional airports. Nagoya, a major city sandwiched between well-served Tokyo and Osaka, got its own international airport last year. And the new Kobe airport is not even the newest, since another opened in March in Kitakyushu, replacing that city's existing landlocked airport. Another is under construction at Shizuoka, to open in March 2009. The government has vowed that Shizuoka's airport will be the last to be built in small cities. But many here suspect that politicians will not be able to wean themselves from the vast amounts of public money that has traditionally been available for big construction projects. They noted that officials at Kansai International Airport in Osaka are pressing ahead with the construction of a second runway and terminal, and that the southern metropolis, Fukuoka, a hop from Shanghai and Seoul, may succeed in a push to build itself a new facility. ''These public works continue because of a cozy relationship between the political arena, bureaucrats and the business world -- and the business world here means the construction business, not the airline business," said Takayoshi Igarashi, a professor at Hosei University. ''Those local airports produce red ink. But no one takes responsibility." Some critics say that what Japan needs is not competition between planes and trains, but integration that might take passengers to hubs that move them efficiently to smaller centers. ''This a country that is so advanced with the bullet trains, yet no one seems to have the idea of tying the two systems together," Concil said.