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To: Bonnie Bear who wrote (11508)	12/14/1997 8:56:00 PM
From: kormac	Respond to of 18056

Bonnie, you are right regarding the differences in the values of the Asians. We must not, however, put them all in the same category. I would say that Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese share in common the fact that they live in very small land areas for the size of their polulations. Hence they must count on foreign trade to keep them going. Of course, the way they have organized the businesses differ. They all suffer from cronyism and the Korean Chaebols are the worst. Japanese Keiretsu system is more powerful. The bottom line for all of them is to gain market share. In doing so they are willing to operate on thin margins and get into trouble when the cushion erodes. Koreans and Japanese will also hunker down when things get tough, the present demonstrations in Seoul nothwithstanding. Taiwanese are more profit oriented and horde their profits for rainy day. The present state in Taiwan seems to bear this out. Thais are different again. Less driven by angst. The same is true of Philippinos. These generalizations could get me into trouble in politically correct circles, but these have been my observations. Regards, Seppo

To: Bonnie Bear who wrote (11508)	12/14/1997 11:11:00 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Respond to of 18056

Bonnie, you are right about different understanding of social systems, even Europe and ours differ quite a lot, but the game of asset management and allocation of resources is the same everywhere, whether a capitalistic, socialistic or even communistic society, ewhen you centralize the decision making of assets and resource allocations you are going to make very big mistakes, when you let the market do, you still make mistakes (witness the inanne cyclicality of the capitalistic system as well), but I think that in a broad based decision making system (non centralized) there are always enough that have gussed well (winners) to take the torche from those that guessed wrong (the losers) and on balance the economy move forward. In a centralized system (such as the Soviet was or even some of the rim countries, Japan included to some extent), when you make a mistake, it is usually a very big national bet, and thus you bet the welfare of the nation. Eventually, they will find their own way of distributed betting and get on the growth path again. Zeev