JeffLee comments

Burns pushed back at Chinese accusations that the United States is seeking to decouple its economy from China's,

Why deny that? The US economy has boomed ever since the decoupling movement got started, while China's nosedived. Similar to how the US went on the ascent economically right after Japan's bubble popped. It's a zero-sum gain world, folks.

No criminal charges? Sure sounds like systemic fraud to me.

Japan's tax authorities are going to love getting their mitts on that kind of windfall.

Do most Republicans still believe that Biden is ruining the economy?

"Japan, a country with a history of inflicting violence on its neighbors...."

If one of those "neighbors" parachuted in a group of commandos in Japan who proceeded to kill and kidnap many civilians, and then Japan responded by dispatching its own commandos to hunt them down and free the hostages in the neighboring country, there might be an equivalency. Otherwise, what is the point of this statement?

The BOJ seems to have got it right, as it predicted a while back that the then-inflation was temporary. So let's pray even harder that Japan's stingy, greedy and super-wealthy corporations agree to give decent raises this spring.

 otherwise roads and bridges... etc won’t get necessary care

Japan's infrastructure is miles ahead of most other countries', with much of the ongoing improvements made while the population stagnated and declined.

Plenty of the high-immigration countries, by contrast, are experiencing infrastructure and social services overwhelmed and worsening, Canada, UK, US, etc.

The idea that a developed economy needs more and more people for its survival is one of the biggest - and most dangerous - myths out there. The global rankings for highest socio-economic levels are dominated by small population countries, like Luxemburg, Denmark, Norway, etc. That's no coincidence.

I thought the book was a lot better and more accurate than its reputation among the Japanophiles.

if the book was “blue eyes watching Japan,” the FX series puts on “Japanese lenses.”

Why should it do that? Wil Adams' real life experience was extraordinary, if not unique. His observations are invaluable to this day. If there was a series about the first Japanese person to live in the America's wild west, for example, it would be kinda dull if filtered through an "American lens."

How that will benefit to ordinary people

If the "ordinary people" belonged to labor unions that actually fought for their rights by strikes, etc., or if they job hopped to advance their careers like their counterparts in all the other industrialized nations, they would surely benefit. Their employers tend to be the greediest and stingiest in the world, so the workers can't afford to be complacent. And yet they are...

It should be pointed out that real wages in the US have been increasingly steadily since the pandemic, especially among the low income brackets, after various strikes.

but will it help me at the supermarket ,johnson sausages now 1,000 yen .

It would if you have been putting even a small amount of savings in a NISA or Ideco every month rather than keeping it in cash, life insurance, or Japanese government bonds, like most people in Japan do.

It's an investment market, so pretty limited as an assessment of the overall "real economy." There's a ton of other metrics to measure economic health anyway.

 30% of Japans buying power gone since per covid down 

Mainly because the US and other economies were forced to hike interest rates to cope with much high inflation levels. Japan has stayed the course -- because it could.

Japan's trade and investment position globally is rock solid. It has been running a current-surplus (while many of its rivals are in deficit), while it remains the world's largest creditor nation. The problem at home is that the corporations and other employers are reluctant to share their record-size wealth with the people who work for them.

He shouldn't have to apologize. Studies in developed countries over the years show a clear trend for well-educated high-earning women in the most equitable societies to still "marry up" financially. It's extremely rare to find female lawyers married to male bus drivers, for example, but not so rare the other way around.

it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

A government that administers a population the same size as Canada's, confined to three buildings covering an area of one city block by two city blocks. When I've gone there for my international drivers license renewal, the entire process takes about 20 minutes. Stunning efficiency there, not like at my bank!

Books, magazines and newspapers. A bit of TV in the evening.

When I first saw the images mentioned, I thought it they were comical memes, for example, the black and Asian Nazis. You'd have to be extremely ignorant or woke-radicalized not to smirk at something like that. And no, it's not "overcompensating." It's plain wrong.

How about Google itself.... willingly handing over some of its massive market share to a minority tech company?

They don't need to. Minorities already make up a majority of Alphabet's tech employees. Also, the two white founders of Google handed over the leadership of the company to a person of color, from India. Same with Microsoft. I guess that's what happens in "systemically racist America."

I wish I could say that firms will be under greater pressure to raise wages, but that's not how things work in Japan. Household financial assets are up, possibly prompting more consumer confidence.

"...had been handling renewal procedures for Chinese driver's licenses for Chinese residents in Japan..."

Nice! I wish my provincial Canadian government set up an office in Tokyo (!) so I could renew my Canadian driver's licence ( which I couldnt use anyway, since I'm a resident of Japan and therefore need to have a Japanese DL, LOL)

Yeah, nothing suspicious going on.

They said the same thing in 2017. What actually happened was that corporate Japan's profits rose to record highs during the Trump years while the average market value of these crybaby listed companies saw a 50 percent rise. (I was invested in the Nikkei at the time and still am, hehe.)

The anti-China Trump tariffs paid dividends! And they continue to do so since Biden has decided to keep most of them in place while today markets on both sides of the Pacific are setting all-time records.

Immigration is an area rich in fear mongering and muck racking.

Indeed, in Canada, the current prime minister energetically warns tells the public that without mass immigration, the country would fall apart. Naturally the country is in fact falling apart while his ultra-neolib policies are in full force.

@moon

the party that destroyed manufacturing in the UK in the 80s.

The UK saw a sharp rise in manufacturing in the 1980s. The slowdown happened during the 70s, when guess who was in charge of the country.

"Why did UK manufacturing productivity growth slow down in the 1970s and speed up in the 1980s?"

https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/papers/1999/w24/ch3.pdf

The pro-mass immigration folks tend to be either deceptive in their arguments or woefully misinformed. It's all about the narrative and not the reality. The public is not as stupid as you think it is.

Could have added Canada to that list. More immigrants per capita than any other OECD nation while socio-economic conditions have plummeted to crisis levels: no affordable housing and healthcare, hardly any decent jobs, very bad public transportation and many other strained and broken infrastructure.

Japan with its prudently low immigration is sooooo much better off. The Japan model could well be the model of the future, because there's no future for countries like Canada anymore.

Japan's exports surge: bad news. Japan's exports fall: bad news. Japan's exports stagnate: bad news. That's the stance of JT's Japan doomsayer crowd.

Doesn't matter, through. Check the message archive: you'll find that nearly every prediction or outlook they've made over many years have been wrong.

Ito is suspected of getting the two women drunk...

How did he (allegedly) do that? Did he spike their drinks without their knowledge? I wonder what the bartender or other staff at the hotel that served them remember seeing.

What's the penalty for non-compliance?

 it will be used to pay wages to the employees

Nice theory. But the reality is that as corporate Japan's profits have soared, their workers' real wages have fallen.

The private sector should only have a very limited a role in Ukraine assistance. By nature, the private sector is driven by self interest, lacking ulterior motives.

Look how it treats its own people at home: systemic wage suppression for 30- years while hoarding the largest cash pile in history.

Students are usually encouraged to do their graduate studies at different universities from where they do their undergraduate studies. And what if these students' undergraduate performance falls below the standard required to enter graduate school?

My main emergency rations are granola bars and canned fruit.

Japanese employers don’t have much respect for their workers, especially their young ones. The assumption is that you devote your life to your company and never take personal holidays or job-hop, as it suppresses your salary as much as possible regardless of the value of your contributions.

Stellantis is like a clearing house of struggling, substandard brands. Good luck competing with the big state-owned Chinese makers, which have the full backing of the communist party, and thus will never have to struggle.

Japan's population is declining, so it doesn't need to generate higher growth, as GDP is an aggregate of the economy's output. It doesn't tell us much about economic health, just size.

The focus should be on higher wages, given that private consumption, not production, drives most of the economy. If Japan really had a labor shortage, then real wages would be rising, which they are not. Simple supply and demand. So the demographic argument is a false one, and it's really about employers wanting to suppress wages.