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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Myword who wrote (4351)	6/11/1998 1:56:00 AM
From: Step1	Respond to of 9980

In response to :>> Imagine that you are a 50 or 60-something Japanese , who has faithfully watched for 8 years as the economy has died and the govt. & cronyists have lied to you and shown their complete lack of trustworthiness and, also, almost total ineptitude to the world. Your "savings" are sitting in a bank that will , quite possibly, collapse all of a sudden , as the sham accounting and worthless assets are revealed. You know you can get your money out RIGHT NOW << I work with a few very nice 50 to 60 Japanese colleagues and some of them have done just that. I have refered 3 Japanese acquaintances to Citibank in the last 6 months although I don't know if they hold their savings in dollars or yen. I understand Citibank is doing a booming business as per reports in the press and that is entirely true. I have actually asked Citibank if they would pay me some kind of commission in money or remission of electronic transfer charges for referrals but they said no such program was on offer. They don't need it I am sure, word of mouth is powerful enough. Too bad I feel I could have sent them a lot of business. Just the last Tuesday (and that really knocked me out of my socks) a young fellow I teach (Matsushita Group) started talking to me about the yen/dollar exchange rate and he mentioned he had asked Citibank for info (without me recommmending it) and was surprised to see it arrive within 4 days with a video . He said he was looking at it ... So, psychologically, yes things are bad. In reality, who the hell knows... The bubble collapsed at the beginning of 1990 almost 8 years ago. I was talking to a friend last night and he mentioned he would retire next year. I said he would certainly be able to play golf a lot after he retires, since he has 3 memberships. His answer was that he was going to try to sell one and he only hoped the company underwriting it would not go bankrupt before he got his money back. Now this was a popular scheme during the go-go years where a company would sell golf memberships with a promise to buy them back 10 years later or otherwise the member could sell them at going market prices if the membership price was higher than what had been paid. No need to say that since these membership bonds were doubling every year for a couple of years, the real estate companies, often arms of bigger unrelated conglomerates, sold a lot of those. With prices depressed now, a lot of those companies can never dream of being able to buy back and with a lot of those contracts coming due this year and next, look for some big bankrupcies soon again. Last one was Nitto Kogyo, now in bankrupcy court.