The US’s Japanese Colony

Writes another friend in Japan:

The BOJ cut interest rates the other day to 0.1% from 0.3% to “fight the appreciation of the yen against the dollar”. God forbid that Japanese people actually get to enjoy a strong currency! I’ve never understood why anyone would even want their money to be worth LESS. Follow the logic and we should just make our money completely worthless….then we can all get rich! All of my money is in yen of course, but that doesn’t mean I have any more faith in this paper than I do anything else.

I’m here in Tokyo and, yes, business has been slow in many areas. Clients are waiting until “next year” to do anything. I know that Nippon Television’s ad revenue has gone down over 25% in this year alone, and that was told to me in the summertime!

I think that Asia in general is going to be fine, but Japan isn’t really in Asia, believe it or not. They are attached at the hip to the U.S., have been under a U.S. loving one-party virtual dictatorship since the war, and have very little public resistance to anything. I’d love to say that it’s ripe for revolution, but young people these days don’t seem to be into much of anything, let alone Big Ideas.

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11:02 am on December 21, 2008