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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 55 из 270Department chiefs from IBJ's Tokyo headquarters would take the bullet train down from Tokyo to Osaka in order to attend a weekly ceremony presided over by the toad. On arriving at Nui's house, the IBJ bankers would join elite stockbrokers from Yamaichi Securities and other trading houses in a midnight vigil. First they would pat the head of the toad. Then they would recite prayers in front of a set of Buddhist statues in Nui's garden. Finally Madame Nui would seat herself in front of the toad, go into a trance, and deliver the oracle-which stocks to buy and which to sell. The financial markets in Tokyo trembled at the verdict. At his peak in 1990, the toad controlled more than $10 billion in financial instruments, making its owner the world's largest individual stock investor.
Madame Nui was also the world's largest individual bank borrower. «From the mouth of the toad,» she proclaimed, «comes money,» and she seems to have called considerable Chinese and Indian sorcery into play, for she parlayed a small initial set of loans made in 1986 into a vast financial empire. By 1991, in addition to IBJ, which lent Nui ¥240 billion to buy IBJ bonds, twenty-nine other banks and financial institutions had extended her loans totaling more than ¥2.8 trillion, equal to about $22 billion at the time.
Onoe Nui was riding the success of the so-called Bubble, when Japanese investors drove stocks and real estate to incredible heights in the late 1980s. In 1989, the capitalization of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) stood slightly higher than that of the New York Stock Exchange; real-estate assessors reckoned that the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were worth more than all of California; the Nikkei index of the TSE rose to 39,000 points in the winter of 1989, after almost a decade of continuous climb. At that level, the average price-to-earnings ratios for stock (about 20 to 30 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong) reached 80 in Japan. Yet brokers were predicting that the stock market would soon rise to 60,000 or even 80,000. Euphoria was in the air. Japan's unique financial system-which is based on asset valuation, rather than on cash flow, as is the norm in the rest of the world-had triumphed.
When the crash came, it hit hard. In the first days of January 1990, the stock market began falling, and it lost 60 percent of its value over the next two years. Ten years later, the Nikkei has still not recovered, meandering in a range between 14,000 and 24,000. When the stock market collapsed, so did real-estate prices, which fell every year after 1991 and are now about one-fifth of Bubble-еrа values or lower.
Madame Nui was also the world's largest individual bank borrower. «From the mouth of the toad,» she proclaimed, «comes money,» and she seems to have called considerable Chinese and Indian sorcery into play, for she parlayed a small initial set of loans made in 1986 into a vast financial empire. By 1991, in addition to IBJ, which lent Nui ¥240 billion to buy IBJ bonds, twenty-nine other banks and financial institutions had extended her loans totaling more than ¥2.8 trillion, equal to about $22 billion at the time.
Onoe Nui was riding the success of the so-called Bubble, when Japanese investors drove stocks and real estate to incredible heights in the late 1980s. In 1989, the capitalization of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) stood slightly higher than that of the New York Stock Exchange; real-estate assessors reckoned that the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were worth more than all of California; the Nikkei index of the TSE rose to 39,000 points in the winter of 1989, after almost a decade of continuous climb. At that level, the average price-to-earnings ratios for stock (about 20 to 30 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong) reached 80 in Japan. Yet brokers were predicting that the stock market would soon rise to 60,000 or even 80,000. Euphoria was in the air. Japan's unique financial system-which is based on asset valuation, rather than on cash flow, as is the norm in the rest of the world-had triumphed.
When the crash came, it hit hard. In the first days of January 1990, the stock market began falling, and it lost 60 percent of its value over the next two years. Ten years later, the Nikkei has still not recovered, meandering in a range between 14,000 and 24,000. When the stock market collapsed, so did real-estate prices, which fell every year after 1991 and are now about one-fifth of Bubble-еrа values or lower.