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JAPANESE ECONOMY IN THE GLOBAL ARENA

--What Can You Expect In The Coming Millennium?--

by Shin-ichiro Kurimoto

Member of the House of Representatives
Economic Anthropologist
Professor Tokyo University of Agriculture

Ever since the end of the cold war in the late '80s, the world economy has witnessed a tremendous shift in the composition of its major players. In the beginning of that change, considerable amounts of funds started to drain from the military industry, which had long provided the highest returns for such money. Who owned that money? Yes, your guess is correct. It was mostly Jewish origin capital. The money that was circulating in the world's military industry had originally been generated by Jewish capital, particularly by those big oil companies who were simply referred to as "the Majors," and who had established highly lucrative business through oil concessions in the Middle East. Therefore, when Saddam Hussein--the boss of the world's second largest oil producer--drove the Jewish origin capital away from the area, the American government's fury and hatred were fired against Iraq far beyond what was considered usual. I visited Iraq this September to find the country suffering from an extremely cruel economic bashing imposed by the United States in the name of "U.N. resolutions."
Let me go back to the Jewish funds. As those funds came to realize that the business of "merchants of death" could no longer guarantee snowballing profits in the 90s, they found their principal way, into the stock markets and partly computer businesses. How much money fled into the new haven during that period? The amount was so huge that we can only guess. The Ministry of Finance (Japan) estimated it to be worth around 2,000 trillion yen, while my estimate is no less than twice as much, 4,000 trillion yen!
Here, I can assure you that my estimate must be far closer to the reality than the MOF's, now that the amount of money that changes hands in the stock markets worldwide every day has swollen to reach 200 trillion yen. It is true that possession of money, up to a certain level, brings you comfort and does no harm to you; however, once it gets beyond that level, it takes him agonizing struggles even just to maintain it. And that's exactly what's happening with the financial captains that dominate the world. While the total worth of stocks traded around the world is only 2,000 trillion yen, how can those funds of 4,000 trillion yen (or it could even be as high as 5,000 trillion yen) expect to generate descent returns?
What this indicates is nothing but a devastating, global money glut. And the glut so big a scale could crush the world's securities market--the very stage in which the money has grown to what it is. In fact, if the financial captains withdrew only a tiny fraction of their total funds, say 40 trillion yen, from the Japanese market, it could most likely result in an instant drop of Nikkei 225 average by about 2,000 points. And the impact of such an incident would easily blow away any administration just like that.
We are well aware that Russia, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea fell victim of such maneuverings and were thrown into political upheavals just a while ago. Against this background, it is not too difficult to assume that Prime Minister Obuchi has sold himself to the American financial capital backed by the Clinton-Gore administration, as it was followed by a series of peculiar events: the success in inviting the next year's Summit to Okinawa; the temporary lull of the stock market; and the speedy (faster than any other country) expression of support for America's sudden air raids against Iraq. The recent passage of the Wiretapping Bill in the Diet could be seen as a way of acting obsequiously on the part of the government in order to gain favors from American concessions. If that is the case, citizens of Japan should stand up against such a betrayal, but what frightens me more is their way of pushing these things through; because, to me, it appears to be inching us towards another global economic catastrophe.
My gut feeling tells me that, in a way, this may be more scary than the imminent Y2K issue. This "cerebral infarction" of the world economy triggered by an unprecedented money glut has an undeniable, concrete reality to it, far more than the dead-end destiny of capitalism once foreseen by Marx as a result of excessive merchandization of labor. What I am afraid of is an eventuality that the financial capital might choose to fuel regional disputes to bring about huge military consumption in order to offset their losses in the stock markets.

Being in my 50s and suffering diabetes, I often have a hard time getting it up these days--ha, ha, hah. But I'm sure my dear young male readers out there must be full of energy and testosterone(C19H28O2) and have 24-hour hard-ons. So, why don't you STAND UP now, and make the world of the 21st century a place that will deserve you, free men? Otherwise, you will have to keep on living in a dire state of slavery.

(End)

Translation by Triking

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