Wal-Mart Reports Big Losses in Japan

Life is Good!

Losses continuing to pile up for Wal-Mart in Japan, and losses for Hillary here at home.  That’s the way it should be!

That would leave it out of three of the largest developed counties in the world.

The operative word there is ‘developed’. Wal-Mart’s business model does best in developing countries where there is a thrist for cheap plastic crap.

Wal-Mart: Buy from Slaves, Sell to Poor People.

Perhaps the six years of WalMart’sstraight losses in Japan might have something to do with this:"From Japan’s Slump in 1990s, Lessons for U.S.”
Toshiyuki Aizawa/Reuters
American economic experts see some parallels between the nation’s current housing-driven slump and Japan’s economic crisis of the 1990s. In June 1998, two traders at a Tokyo brokerage rested on a day the dollar reached a seven-year high .

By STEVE LOHR
Published: February 9, 2008
In broad strokes, the parallels are alarming. After a long boom, the Japanese economy in the 1990s, as America’s today, was jolted by a sharp plunge in the real estate market.

Could the American Economy Find Itself in a Lost Decade? In Tokyo, the government bankers and policy makers were slow to recognize the scope of the problem. Bad loans piled up. The financial troubles rippled through the economy as consumer spending and job growth fell.

The Japanese slump proved extraordinarily long-lived, ending only a few years ago, a stretch of stagnation known as Japan’s lost decade. It was a humbling and lasting setback for a nation once feared and admired as a model of economic dynamism.

The shadow of Japan hangs over the American economy these days. The United States is sliding into a housing-driven downturn, economists say, just as it also appears to be losing some of its global edge from the productivity-enhancing gains driven by the technology investments of recent decades. For Japan, experts point out, the housing bubble burst just as the rise of China as an export power hurt Japanese manufacturers.

“I think there are a lot more similarities than people are willing to admit,” said Clyde V. Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington-based policy research organization that has long promoted American industry.

“The American economy is very fragile now,” said Mr. Prestowitz, who was a trade negotiator with Japan in the Reagan administration.

But the extreme Japanese experience, most analysts agree, stands less as a prediction of America’s fate than as a cautionary example. A Japan-style quagmire, they say, is an outcome that can be avoided in the United States with sound economic policy.

Japan’s central bank and finance ministry, economists say, waited far too long — years — before taking steps to revive Japan’s economy in the 1990’s.

Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, is a former professor at Princeton University and a student of Japan’s policy missteps. And while a number of experts fault Mr. Bernanke for what they see as the Fed’s poor communications with both Main Street and Wall Street, the central bank’s recent moves suggest that he has taken those lessons to heart.

His past comments, however, indicate that Mr. Bernanke thinks that low interest rates alone are not enough to revive an ailing economy. In a 2003 speech in Tokyo, for example, he offered a prescription for Japan’s malaise: a more aggressive monetary policy and “explicit, though temporary, cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities” to stimulate the economy.

“The United States is moving faster than the Japanese did,” said Charles Yuji Horioka, a professor of economics at Osaka University. “So far, so good. But American policy makers have to be ready to take further steps as needed.”

The American economy, many economists predict, will deteriorate further before things turn around. The government’s report last week that employment fell in January, the first decline in more than four years, was the latest sign of trouble. The depth and duration of the downturn, economists say, will largely depend on how much more bad news is coming from banks and other financial institutions.

Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, warned that the roughly $100 billion in bad loans reported by banks to date could increase nearly tenfold, as the defaults spread beyond the subprime mortgage loans to consumer loans, credit cards and corporate lending.

Still, even Mr. Roubini sees scant chance of the United States following Japan’s path. “I’m very pessimistic, but I don’t think it will be anything like Japan,” he said.

Continued:  The Japanese slump proved extraordinarily long-lived, ending only a few years ago, a stretch of stagnation known as Japan’s lost decade. It was a humbling and lasting setback for a nation once feared and admired as a model of economic dynamism.

The shadow of Japan hangs over the American economy these days. The United States is sliding into a housing-driven downturn, economists say, just as it also appears to be losing some of its global edge from the productivity-enhancing gains driven by the technology investments of recent decades. For Japan, experts point out, the housing bubble burst just as the rise of China as an export power hurt Japanese manufacturers.(Reuters)Now isn’t that interesting that housing bubbles burst on both continents as Chinese exports increased?

...cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities...

Free market economy my foot! If free enterprize were truly “beautiful” it wouldn’t require “monetary and fiscal authorities” to rig the game.

Leader of the world? The US can’t even have an original real estate-triggered recession.