Interesting story on the world’s largest pension fund. While it is great that this fund rewards performance and not how good your connections are, that still does not take away from the fact that there are too many people retiring and too few people taking the place of those who will retire in the coming decades.
NY Times – On His Shoulders, a Graying Japan
also here: On His Shoulders, a Graying Japan | theledger.com
11 years of blogging…
Archives for the month of: September, 2003
Hmm…this looks interesting…
FingerWorks TouchStream LP
via al3x.net
Matt has links to 2 good articles on the Japanese economy including an Economist article on the current state of affairs as well as an IHT article about the glut of hotels in Japan.
M@Blog: Fixing Japan
Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic music has been updated! Hilarious commentary including on Japan…
“It reminds me of that scene in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ where they go near Toontown, and you can see clouds of smoke and yelling and fighting and all sorts of haywire shit happening above the horizon to signify the complete and total lunacy of the place. Japan is just like that.”
Phenomenal article by Gillian Tett (ex-FT Tokyo bureau chief) on LTCB, Shinsei, Japanese bank reform (or the lack of it.) Long but well worth your time.
As they [bankers Vernon Jordan, David Fite, and Tim Collins] looked around [the LTCB cafeteria in 1990] they saw that in Japan bankers sit in neat, quiet rows, in a clear pattern. At some of the tables there were just women, wearing matching uniforms; at others there were only men in dark blue suits. This was not segregation by sex but by status: the women, so-called “office ladies”, all held the lowliest clerical jobs, so they tended to sit together.
“I have seen segregation before,” Jordan, a political activist and close friend of former US president Bill Clinton, later recalled. “I’m from the American South – I grew up with segregation. But when I looked at that canteen, it was like a whole new type of divide… it was like nothing I’d seen before.”