From: Tim Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Date: Thu Feb 18 1999 - 20:07:42 MST
Wei Dai said
>I do not understand why Japanese savers do not invest more of their money
>outside of Japan...
>It just seems like a win-win solution, yet it is not adopted nor even
>promoted. Why?
Because the Japanese government made it illegal in order to provide cheap
internal investment capital (hence they were able to do things that no
western company paying 10% interest could dream of. this also caused the
property bubble which lead to down town Tokyo being valued more highly
than most of California put together.
Now they no longer need the investment capital and could valuably shift
the policy to one of external investment, but it is to late to sell those
Yen for their 1980s price.
tim
PS: this is not as simple as i have made seem: there are many biollions
of dollars worth of Japanese Yen-backed investments in the West, just not
enough to pay wages for two hundred million septuagenarians. ;-(
best,
t
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