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“What most likely happened was pedal misapplication.” So concluded an official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US body which has just published its report on the spate of accidents involving Toyota cars.
“What most likely happened was pedal misapplication.” So concluded an official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US body which has just published its report on the spate of accidents involving Toyota cars.
S&P’s downgrade of Japan’s credit-rating raises a disturbing prospect. Is this stage two of the global credit crisis, featuring chain of sovereign defaults amongst the largest economies?
Who has survived the global credit crisis in the best shape? As Chou En Lai said about the impact of the French Revolution, it’s still too early to judge. The snap verdict that China is the big winner and the US and rest of the old G7 are big losers is already looking questionable.
Serious sport, according to George Orwell, is war minus the shooting. In the words of Bill Shankly, legendary manager of Liverpool F.C., football is not a matter of life and death; it’s much more important than that.
Emerging markets used to be known as markets you couldn’t emerge from in an emergency. History is littered with examples of financial disasters in young fast-growing countries, from the Argentinian default of the 1890s to the Asian crisis of the mid-1990s.
By orchestrating a massive appreciation of the yen in the mid 1980s, the US condemned Japan to decades of stagnation and ended the challenge to its own economic hegemony. Effectively Japan was forced to commit financial hara-kiri.
The Japanese are doing it again. The Koreans prefer to do it when nobody’s watching. The Chinese are at it brazenly and, like everything else they do, on an enormous scale. The Swiss tried it, without much success.
The Democratic Party of Japan is about to make a momentous choice. Next week’s contest for the party leadership also decides who holds the office of prime minister. The contrast between the two candidates could not be starker.
The Greeks have got a lot to answer for. As well as roiling the markets and torpedoing the euro, they have inflicted serious damage on the debate about the global crisis and its remedies.
Imagine you are starring in the financial equivalent of the “Life On Mars” TV show. You wake up one morning to find you have time-travelled back to the early nineteen nineties. The Berlin Wall has just fallen. The triumph of capitalism is unleashing a tsunami of globalization as billions of people join the market economy as workers and consumers.