What did you think the odds were of seeing this
headline when Japan was here buying up Rockefeller Center back in 1990: “In a Shift, Chinese Capital Flows to
Japanese Firms.”
In late ’80s and early ’90s the Japanese were here
buying large real estate projects such as Rockefeller Center and the Pebble
Beach golf course. The way overpaid and by then mid ’90s, many of these
projects were bought back. A syndicate comprising, among others, Arnold Palmer
and Clint Eastwood, bought Pebble Beach back from the Japanese lender who
foreclosed on the property. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center for $1.4
billion in 1989 and lost the property in bankruptcy in the mid-’90s. It is now owned by an
American syndicate.
The buzz back then was that the Japanese were taking over the world. They were just better at manufacturing and business than we were and had the money to prove it. We were told to emulate their business style. Paranoid books and movies like “Rising Sun” were grave warnings about Japan’s ascendancy. Then it all went poof. And it has been going poof ever since.
Roughly 20 years of stagnation have been the result of
Keynesian stimulus spending by the government. They have almost tapped out the
giant Postal Savings system and now need foreign capital to invest in their
sovereign bonds. Now we read that Chinese companies are investing in Japanese
companies:
“Japanese companies have long assumed they would not be bought by Chinese companies,” says Takashi Nomura, an attorney specializing in Chinese businesses at Nishimura Asahi, a large Japanese law firm. “Now, receiving capital injections from Chinese companies and seeking their help in penetrating the Chinese market is seen as a viable option.”
With the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the First World,
has xenophobic Japan run out of capital?
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