Japan

Posted Apr 29, 2009 08:30am EDT by Aaron Task in Investing, Newsmakers
Related: FXI, EPP, PAF, GCH, PGJ, EWJ, EEM

I still believe the "gaijin" did the right thing.

AMATEUR hour was over. When Shinsei Bank was founded in 2000 from the husk of a failed Japanese lender, it was meant to show the country how to run a bank to international standards. Unfortunately, it has done just that. Japanese banks escaped big writedowns and even bought large stakes in Western banks. But Shinsei ploughed headlong into all three of global banking’s booby traps: consumer lending, subprime mortgages and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Indonesia has a scandal on its hands, and it involves gross domestic product.

That won’t sound too serious to observers worried about corruption or anti-pornography laws intensifying debates about Islam’s role in public. Yet what might best be described as the “4 percent crisis” is getting breathless press coverage.

That’s the dismal rate at which many expect the economy will grow next year. What, did someone say dismal? When you look around the world, it’s hard to think of a sizeable economy that might perform at even close to 4 percent.

The world's fastest computer is so big, it needs a house the size of a hangar. The Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan is like a huge weathercaster, tracking sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters.

'Supercomputer' seems to be an understatement. The $350 million machine is more like a super duper computer -- it runs 35.6 trillion calculations per second. That's almost five times faster than its closest competitor and as fast as the top five U.S. supercomputers combined.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi threw his weight behind his besieged financial tsar yesterday as voices against proposed banking industry reforms grew louder and markets wrestled with policy confusion.

A day after Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka delayed the release of a report on cleaning up the banking system, no one was any the wiser about the fate of plans to speed up the disposal of bad loans.