Wednesday, May 20, 2009

So you think the UK is in trouble?

Our recession here in the UK looks a rather mild affair compared to the slowdown in Japan. From its peak in 2008q1, the Japanese economy has declined by 9.1 percent. Moreover, the economy is only 10 percent larger relative to 1994. This current slowdown has wiped out six years of growth.

The reason of Japan's catastrophic collapse sits on the other side of the Pacific. US consumers stopped borrowing and buying. In the first quarter of this year, alone Japanese exports declined by 26 percent.

9 comments:

  1. Japan - never really recovered from their housing bubble.

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  2. All creditor and export based nations will feel more immediate pain than the debtor and consumption based nations. Especially when they realise we can't pay them back. I intend to write a post on this soon myself as I said a while back that Germany, Japan, China etc will all fare worse than UK, US immediately.

    For a historical parallel see the great depression. America was a creditor and export nation to Europe - yet had the worst depression. Same is happening again.

    As above Japan is a mess from the policies it did in the ninties and beyond. We are replicating the very same ones.

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  3. > As above Japan is a mess from the policies it did in the ninties and beyond. We are replicating the very same ones

    True! Japan made taxpayers bail out the banks instead of removing these failed institutions from the market and protecting depositors.

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  4. Why does the developed world need growth? Surely this is old conventional short-term thinking that will land us firmly in the long-term mire?

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  5. Yes Stevie, lets be more like Africa.

    So stoopid I don't even know where to start.

    You wouldn't be one of those whose faith is in Gaia would you?

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  6. Anticitizen - well I'm not going to get into all of this with what appears to be a conventionally-thinking, hide-bound dinosaur, so fine - let's just grow as before willy-nilly and everything in the garden will be rosy. And by the way, if we pay no taxes as you advocate, we may well end up like Africa. I think it would be preferable for the world if Africa moved towards us, which means we may have to mark time for a while.

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  7. Wow, Stevie b what a slam dunk. How is anyone going to argue with the sheer volume of facts and evidence you provided to back your viewpoint up. I for one am now a fully paid up progressive!!

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  8. Well I put the idea forward in the hope that greater minds than mine might pick it up and debate it. Not for the first time, I was clearly mistaken.

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  9. People whine too much about "ending up like Japan" - a country with little crime, universal healthcare, schools, no immigration to swell prison population / social security costs and where people are so disciplined that they actually *starve* when their pension runs out!

    Here, OTOH, Its Different:

    Once the money to continuously paper over the widening cracks in the multi-cultural fantasy runs out, life her will be much more like it is in the Balkans, or South Africa, not pleasant like Japan at all.

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