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Bellingham Bill
2014 Jul 16, 3:48am
Stocks shrinking = no investment.
Japan's stock isn't shrinking. It's got the same stuff it had 20 years ago, modulo what has been extracted.
and I argue that since it doesn't have to worry about infrastructure expansion any more -- breaking new ground for housing etc -- it can focus more on creating actual wealth, though with the yuan still at 6 it's tough since that puts Chinese wages at 1/3 their wage level.
Japan still has millions of young people looking for work.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=FKv
even though they've lost 40% of their incoming population
New Renter
2014 Jul 16, 4:02am
In the good old days conquering distant lands made you a "Great Empire"
Today the same thing makes you an "Evil Imperialist"Those were the good ole days! Conquering and pillaging... Just taking all the resources and enslaving whoever... Those were the days when you got something for winning. Now, you get nothing but some moral obligation. Then you have to twist yourself into knots figuring out how to get the loot while still appearing to have the moral high ground. If only things could be simple again.
Ah yes, like teh good old days when a man would find the woman of his dreams, club her on the head and drag her off to the cave.
Why oh why did we ever deviate from that perfect life?
New Renter
2014 Jul 16, 4:06am
I don't see why it can't support 100 billion people eventually.
Depends - is everyone willing to spend their lives treating the earth like the spaceship it is? That is existing on the absolute minimum of space, calories, oxygen and possessions then sure.
But would you really want your kids to have to exist like that?
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Economic decline takes many shapes. In the northern Italian town of Ivrea, it looks like the abandoned, overgrown tennis courts where the employees of electronics giant Olivetti SpA once played.
In the 1980s, Ivrea was a European version of Silicon Valley. Of the 50,000 people employed by Olivetti, half worked in the town, enjoying generous salaries and plush corporate recreation facilities. Today Ivrea's biggest employers are the state health service and two call centres. Together they employ 3,100 people.
Olivetti still exists, but these days it is a small office machinery company. Its former factories, jewels of 20th-century industrial architecture, have been refashioned as museums. Most of Ivrea's 30-year-olds have little work and live off their parents’ pensions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/14/us-italy-economy-submerging-specialrepor-idUSKBN0FJ0QT20140714