Description
In the West we have watched aghast as, one
by one over the past thirty years, many of our key industries contracted or even collapsed in the face of aggressive Japanese competition. First it was shipbuilding, then the motor industry, followed by manufacturers of electronics, machine tools and consumer durables. Next on the list, warns Aron Viner, are the great banks and institutions of Wall Street, the City of London and other capitals of European finance.
A few facts, chosen almost at random, will illustrate the resources which the Japanese can bring to bear in their coming assault on these central citadels of Western capitalism.
โข Of the world's major banks, the four biggest are Japanese, if size is measured in terms of assets; if equity capital is the yardstick, then Japan has the twelve biggest banks.
โข The Osaka stock exchange is the third largest in the world - but still only one eighth of the size of Tokyo's.
โข The biggest stockbroker in the world, Nomura Securities, is valued on the Tokyo exchange at over ยฃ30 billion.
โข The giant Japanese corporations are sitting on mountains of cash two of them, Toyota and Matsushita, each have liquid assets of over $12 billion.
โข In the year ending 31 March 1986 Japan's surplus on her trade with the rest of the world totalled $93.76 billion.
But Aron Viner is not simply interested in bludgeoning us with such statistics, stunning though they are; he wants to explain not only how the Japanese accumulated these immense resources but also how they will use them. In order to foresee how Japan's enormous financial power is likely to affect the new global markets in securities, he suggests, we must understand two things: the way in which the Japanese think about business and the way in which the Japanese think about themselves.
ISBN:9781850916147
