JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 59 из 270The Tokyo Stock Exchange meanwhile set upits own emerging stock market, named Mothers. The pieces would seem to be in place for a brand-new form of stock investing. At the same time, all the old rules still apply over at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where P/E ratios are still astronomical. It remains to be seen whether Mothers, the OTC, and Jasdaq can nurture stock that pays dividends and rewards investors-or whether they will follow the pattern of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the 1980s and merely engineer another big Bubble.
During much of the past half century, money poured into the Tokyo Stock Exchange, driving stocks relentlessly upward. After decades in this hothouse atmosphere, Japan's financial community came to believe in the «magic of assets»: assets would always rise in value, especially when calculated by a technique, dear to MOF's heart, known as «book value accounting.» According to this system, owners of stocks, bonds, and property do not need to assess their holdings at market value. Instead, balance sheets show stock at the price purchased-the stock you bought at 100 seven years ago, though now worth 200, still appears on the books at 100.
This is a complete fiction, and it spawned a concept known as «latent profits,» which is the difference between purchase value and current value. The concept of «latent losses» did not exist. Investors have ignored dividends and looked exclusively at «asset value» and «latent profits.»
The same principles have ruled in real estate, where returns have averaged 2 percent or lower; even minus returns were common. The crash came even harder for real estate than it did for stocks, and by 1996 official land prices for Japan as a whole had dropped to half their 1991 peak (real prices were 88 percent off or lower at auction) and stayed low for the rest of the decade. Vacancy rates in Tokyo's commercial sector grew as high as 15 to 25 percent, and rents were half or a third of what they had been in 1988.
The «magic of assets» leads to a distorted view of Japan's strengths, since so much energy has gone into making banks and securities houses bigger but not necessarily better. In 1995, when ranked by assets, the top-ten banks in the world were all Japanese, with twenty-nine banks in the top one hundred (versus only nine U.S. banks). However, when Moody's Investors Service quantified liabilities, it found that only five of Japan's eleven city banks had assets in excess of bad loans; no banks rated A, only one rated B, three C, and twenty-six banks D. By early 1999, the average rating of major banks had slid to E+, meaning that they were essentially bankrupt.
During much of the past half century, money poured into the Tokyo Stock Exchange, driving stocks relentlessly upward. After decades in this hothouse atmosphere, Japan's financial community came to believe in the «magic of assets»: assets would always rise in value, especially when calculated by a technique, dear to MOF's heart, known as «book value accounting.» According to this system, owners of stocks, bonds, and property do not need to assess their holdings at market value. Instead, balance sheets show stock at the price purchased-the stock you bought at 100 seven years ago, though now worth 200, still appears on the books at 100.
This is a complete fiction, and it spawned a concept known as «latent profits,» which is the difference between purchase value and current value. The concept of «latent losses» did not exist. Investors have ignored dividends and looked exclusively at «asset value» and «latent profits.»
The same principles have ruled in real estate, where returns have averaged 2 percent or lower; even minus returns were common. The crash came even harder for real estate than it did for stocks, and by 1996 official land prices for Japan as a whole had dropped to half their 1991 peak (real prices were 88 percent off or lower at auction) and stayed low for the rest of the decade. Vacancy rates in Tokyo's commercial sector grew as high as 15 to 25 percent, and rents were half or a third of what they had been in 1988.
The «magic of assets» leads to a distorted view of Japan's strengths, since so much energy has gone into making banks and securities houses bigger but not necessarily better. In 1995, when ranked by assets, the top-ten banks in the world were all Japanese, with twenty-nine banks in the top one hundred (versus only nine U.S. banks). However, when Moody's Investors Service quantified liabilities, it found that only five of Japan's eleven city banks had assets in excess of bad loans; no banks rated A, only one rated B, three C, and twenty-six banks D. By early 1999, the average rating of major banks had slid to E+, meaning that they were essentially bankrupt.