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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 64 из 270So Japan in effect exported its Bubble to Asia, lending heedlessly to build office towers, shopping centers, and hotels, as was done in Tokyo and Osaka years ago. «We are just asset eaters,» says Sanada Yukimitsu, an associate director at Tokyo Mitsubishi International in Hong Kong. «The Europeans and Americans consider profitability, they manage their assets. If there is no profit, those banks just withdraw. But Japanese banks lend even when the price isn't so good.»
And lend they did. Asian countries modeled their markets on Japan: under the leadership of strongmen such as Indonesia's Suharto and Malaysia's Mahathir, governments set values, and told large investors what to buy, and they obeyed. From MOF's point of view, Southeast Asia was one last blessed corner of Eden that was still free of dangerous wild animals like P/E ratios and cash-flow analysis. From the mid-1990s on, Japanese banks doubled and tripled their loans to Southeast Asia, providing the lion's share of loans to Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and more than half of all foreign money lent to Thailand.
There is an old Yiddish joke that asks: Question: What does the saying mean, Though he slips and falls on the ice, the Avenging Angel will still catch up with you? Answer: He's not called the Avenging Angel for nothing! Alas for MOF. In the fall of 1997, the Avenging Angel arrived in Southeast Asia waving the flaming sword of «real value.» The Korean, Thai, Malaysian, and Indonesian currencies collapsed overnight. Suharto and Mahathir watched in helpless rage as the markets, long used to obedience, went their own way: down. The mistake of the Asian nations was to lower the walls around their credit systems, something Japan would never do – hence when the crash came they could not control it as MOF did in Japan.
A massive financial meltdown of the sort that had been taking place slowly in Japan over seven years happened within a few months. Japan's banks, whose loans to the region were four times those of U.S. banks, are writing off tens of billions of dollars of bad debt. The results for Japan, however, are not entirely negative, for while the banks lost heavily, Japan's manufacturers benefited from the Asian crisis to snap up businesses and properties at bargain prices. Much is at stake in MOF's new offensive in Asia. Japanese banks and stockbrokers are in such trouble at home, and have lost so much business in the United States and Europe, that if their Asian policy does not succeed they may languish permanently as second-class citizens in world finance. «What's left if this fails?» asks Alicia Ogawa, the head of research for Nikko Salomon Smith Barney. «That's a good question.
And lend they did. Asian countries modeled their markets on Japan: under the leadership of strongmen such as Indonesia's Suharto and Malaysia's Mahathir, governments set values, and told large investors what to buy, and they obeyed. From MOF's point of view, Southeast Asia was one last blessed corner of Eden that was still free of dangerous wild animals like P/E ratios and cash-flow analysis. From the mid-1990s on, Japanese banks doubled and tripled their loans to Southeast Asia, providing the lion's share of loans to Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and more than half of all foreign money lent to Thailand.
There is an old Yiddish joke that asks: Question: What does the saying mean, Though he slips and falls on the ice, the Avenging Angel will still catch up with you? Answer: He's not called the Avenging Angel for nothing! Alas for MOF. In the fall of 1997, the Avenging Angel arrived in Southeast Asia waving the flaming sword of «real value.» The Korean, Thai, Malaysian, and Indonesian currencies collapsed overnight. Suharto and Mahathir watched in helpless rage as the markets, long used to obedience, went their own way: down. The mistake of the Asian nations was to lower the walls around their credit systems, something Japan would never do – hence when the crash came they could not control it as MOF did in Japan.
A massive financial meltdown of the sort that had been taking place slowly in Japan over seven years happened within a few months. Japan's banks, whose loans to the region were four times those of U.S. banks, are writing off tens of billions of dollars of bad debt. The results for Japan, however, are not entirely negative, for while the banks lost heavily, Japan's manufacturers benefited from the Asian crisis to snap up businesses and properties at bargain prices. Much is at stake in MOF's new offensive in Asia. Japanese banks and stockbrokers are in such trouble at home, and have lost so much business in the United States and Europe, that if their Asian policy does not succeed they may languish permanently as second-class citizens in world finance. «What's left if this fails?» asks Alicia Ogawa, the head of research for Nikko Salomon Smith Barney. «That's a good question.