JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 66 из 270As Japan entered the twenty-first century, the hype about the Big Bang had died out, and it was consigned to dusty shelves as just another government report. It was business as usual in Tokyo.
This brings us to a striking feature of Japan's post-Bubble trauma: paralysis. Instituting a real Big Bang is simply out of the question, for the whole edifice of Japanese finance might crumble if MOF allowed economic rationalism to infiltrate. It has been said that the Bubble losses were not as severe as they seem because they were merely «paper losses» – but for Japan, paper losses are a serious issue because the very genius of MOF's system was its ability to inflate assets on paper: Japan's rapid postwar development depended on it. So when troubles began to appear, MOF trod very gently, afraid to make any sudden moves.
The concept of «latent profits» has come home to roost in the form of «latent losses.» Banks lent heavily to real-estate companies that own land now valued at a fifth or a tenth of the price they paid for it a decade or two ago. As the real-estate companies go under, these properties become the problem of their lenders, but rather than write down the losses year by year on a present-value basis, the banks have kept these properties on their books at purchase value; the moment they sell, they must suddenly report huge losses. So the market came to a near-complete stop in the 1990s: banks didn't sell because of «latent losses,» and few bought because not enough transactions occurred to lower the prices to profitable levels.
Paralysis also rules in the stock market. The amount of money raised by new stock offerings in 1989 was ¥5.8 trillion; by 1992, it had fallen to ¥4 billion, a shocking 0.07 percent of what it had been three years earlier. By 1998 this figure had crawled back up to ¥284 billion, still a tiny fraction of its earlier height. Another telling statistic is the number of companies listed on the exchange. In Tokyo, that number remained almost flat during the 1990s, while that of the New York Stock Exchange rose by 45 percent.
Overall, the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges raised about ¥1.5 trillion (about $13 billion) in initial and secondary public offerings in 1995-1999; the equivalent for the same period on the combined New York and NASDAQ exchanges was considerably more than $600 billion, a truly staggering difference. To get a sense of the scales of magnitude involved, consider that in the first three months of 2000 alone the NYSE and NASDAQ raised $92 billion through public offerings, far more than the total raised in Tokyo and Osaka over the entire past decade.
This brings us to a striking feature of Japan's post-Bubble trauma: paralysis. Instituting a real Big Bang is simply out of the question, for the whole edifice of Japanese finance might crumble if MOF allowed economic rationalism to infiltrate. It has been said that the Bubble losses were not as severe as they seem because they were merely «paper losses» – but for Japan, paper losses are a serious issue because the very genius of MOF's system was its ability to inflate assets on paper: Japan's rapid postwar development depended on it. So when troubles began to appear, MOF trod very gently, afraid to make any sudden moves.
The concept of «latent profits» has come home to roost in the form of «latent losses.» Banks lent heavily to real-estate companies that own land now valued at a fifth or a tenth of the price they paid for it a decade or two ago. As the real-estate companies go under, these properties become the problem of their lenders, but rather than write down the losses year by year on a present-value basis, the banks have kept these properties on their books at purchase value; the moment they sell, they must suddenly report huge losses. So the market came to a near-complete stop in the 1990s: banks didn't sell because of «latent losses,» and few bought because not enough transactions occurred to lower the prices to profitable levels.
Paralysis also rules in the stock market. The amount of money raised by new stock offerings in 1989 was ¥5.8 trillion; by 1992, it had fallen to ¥4 billion, a shocking 0.07 percent of what it had been three years earlier. By 1998 this figure had crawled back up to ¥284 billion, still a tiny fraction of its earlier height. Another telling statistic is the number of companies listed on the exchange. In Tokyo, that number remained almost flat during the 1990s, while that of the New York Stock Exchange rose by 45 percent.
Overall, the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges raised about ¥1.5 trillion (about $13 billion) in initial and secondary public offerings in 1995-1999; the equivalent for the same period on the combined New York and NASDAQ exchanges was considerably more than $600 billion, a truly staggering difference. To get a sense of the scales of magnitude involved, consider that in the first three months of 2000 alone the NYSE and NASDAQ raised $92 billion through public offerings, far more than the total raised in Tokyo and Osaka over the entire past decade.