Koizumi's Last Stand

[Sierra Mike]

At last...things are heating up in Japan regarding the state of its desultory economy. And as one might suspect, Japan's Dapper Dan, Koizumi Junichiro, is gonna take it right in the labanza...

Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is used to making other politicians unhappy. But even he seemed shaken when his longtime supporter Mikio Aoki took the floor of the Diet last Tuesday and added his voice to the growing dissension over the Prime Minister's latest round of banking reform proposals. In a withering attack, he accused Koizumi's new finance chief Heizo Takenaka of being a loose cannon, an unelected and unaccountable radical operating outside the system. And he finished with a direct salvo against the man he used to defend, telling Koizumi, "What is lacking most is leadership in coping with economic issues." When the barrage was over, the Prime Minister smiled wanly and thanked Aoki for his "encouragement."
One of the areas where Koizumi-san faces the greatest opposition is:

Koizumi swept into office in April 2001 amid a wave of popular optimism. Eighteen months later, none of his mighty promises?such as privatizing bloated state-run companies and slashing wasteful public works projects?have come to pass.Public works is the greatest political tool in Japan...essentially, this is the construction business, folks. And the construction business in Japan is rife with the yakuza, Japan's version of the mafia. Word has it that all the major political players in Japan's major prefectures are in the yakuza's pocket. If so, no wonder Koizumi has got his work cut out for him...

Anyway. Read all about it at Last Stand (http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501021104-384890,00.html)

SM

[Coot]

Yep, it's an economic cesspool in Japan right now. The government is propping up the banks, the banks are carrying trillions in bad debt they are afraid to write off because already failed businesses would actually have to close. Here's another story on the subject. (http://www.msnbc.com/news/845708.asp)

.Indeed, Japan has seemed paralyzed: unable or unwilling to implement the kind of reform the world says it must if it is to keep its economy from imploding.

And the world is now pinning its hopes on two outsiders to take on an entrenched political bureaucracy. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his economics minister Heizo Takenaka are reformers who are trying to patch together a plan to clean up the banks’ balance sheets.

But in a shrinking economy, new bad debts pile up almost as quickly as the banks clear out the old ones. As many as 200,000 Japanese companies have all but failed.


We're beginning to feel it where I work. We're 70% Japanese owned, and while our business is thriving, the parent company is beginning to squeeze. Forced decapitalization of its successful American holdings to infuse cash into the parent company