Money and Finance
- Kyle Bass: The Looming Crises In Asia
Link to: Kyle Bass: The Looming Crises in Asia For the last several years, nobody has been more outspokenly bearish on Japan than Kyle Bass. In a recent talk, Bass reiterated his doubts about Japan’s chances of averting a debt crisis. What’s...
- Jim Grant: The World Has Never Seen The Likes Of China’s Credit Frenzy
Via ValueWalk:HERETOFORE UNIMAGINED The world has never seen the likes of China’s credit frenzy. From year-end 2008 through the third quarter of 2013, assets on the balance sheets of Chinese banks grew by $15.1 trillion to $24.3 trillion. That growth...
- Look To The East For Cheap Yield – By Merryn Somerset Webb
This brings me to one of my favourite long-term investments – what many readers insist is my “blind spot” and a market that no one has used the word “bubble” to describe for over two decades. I’m talking about Japan, of course (full disclosure:...
- Japan’s Economy In 2012: Multiple Challenges - By Vaclav Smil
“Adding insult to injury” sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂 nakitsura ni hachi -- literally “a bee to a crying face”. But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has...
- Three Reasons Japan’s Economic Pain Is Getting Worse – By Jared Diamond
Japan’s economic problems are serious and getting worse. Foremost among them is the crushing burden of government debt. Japan’s ratio of government debt to gross domestic product, currently about 2.28, is by far the highest in the industrial world,...
Money and Finance
John Mauldin: The Mother of All Painted-In Corners
I wrote several years ago that Japan is a bug in search of a windshield. And in January I wrote that 2013 is the Year of the Windshield. The recent volatility in Japanese markets is breathtaking but characteristic of what one should come to expect from a country that is on the brink of fiscal and economic disaster. I don't mean to be trite, from a global perspective; Japan is not Greece: Japan is the third-largest economy in the world. Its biggest banks are on a par with those of the US. It is a global power in trade and trade finance. Its currency has reserve status. It has two of the world’s six largest corporations and 71 of the largest 500, surpassed only by the US and comfortably ahead of China, with 46. Even with the rest of Asia's big companies combined with China's, the total barely surpasses Japan's (CNN). In short, when Japan embarks on a very risky fiscal and monetary strategy, it delivers a serious impact on the rest of the world. And doubly so because global growth is now driven by Asia.
Japan has fired the first real shot in what future historians will record as the most significant global currency war since the 1930s and the first in a world dominated by true fiat money.
At the risk of glossing over details, I am going to try and summarize the problems of Japan in a single letter. First, a summary of the summary: Japan has painted itself into the mother all corners. There will be no clean or easy exit. There is going to be massive economic pain as they the Japanese try and find a way out of their problems, and sadly, the pain will not be confined to Japan. This will be the true test of the theories of neo-Keynesianism writ large. Japan is going to print and monetize and spend more than almost any observer can currently imagine. You like what Paul Krugman prescribes? You think he makes sense? You (we all!) are going to be participants in a real-world experiment on how that works out.
- Kyle Bass: The Looming Crises In Asia
Link to: Kyle Bass: The Looming Crises in Asia For the last several years, nobody has been more outspokenly bearish on Japan than Kyle Bass. In a recent talk, Bass reiterated his doubts about Japan’s chances of averting a debt crisis. What’s...
- Jim Grant: The World Has Never Seen The Likes Of China’s Credit Frenzy
Via ValueWalk:HERETOFORE UNIMAGINED The world has never seen the likes of China’s credit frenzy. From year-end 2008 through the third quarter of 2013, assets on the balance sheets of Chinese banks grew by $15.1 trillion to $24.3 trillion. That growth...
- Look To The East For Cheap Yield – By Merryn Somerset Webb
This brings me to one of my favourite long-term investments – what many readers insist is my “blind spot” and a market that no one has used the word “bubble” to describe for over two decades. I’m talking about Japan, of course (full disclosure:...
- Japan’s Economy In 2012: Multiple Challenges - By Vaclav Smil
“Adding insult to injury” sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂 nakitsura ni hachi -- literally “a bee to a crying face”. But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has...
- Three Reasons Japan’s Economic Pain Is Getting Worse – By Jared Diamond
Japan’s economic problems are serious and getting worse. Foremost among them is the crushing burden of government debt. Japan’s ratio of government debt to gross domestic product, currently about 2.28, is by far the highest in the industrial world,...