Japan intends to distance itself from US (politics)

[YukisUke]

Originally Posted by kirakira

Nah I dont think bombing of 2 cities is really that important to current Japanese situation. It has everything to do with the current economic crisis which snowballed from the US and now it is killing everyone. After Japan has suffered so much economically for the past decade and finally saw a glimmer of hope, now their economy has collapsed again (-12% p.a. for the last quarter), they've just lost a bit of hope from listening to the US.

Listening to the US is like listening to a skipping record. No offense.

[kirakira]

Originally Posted by YukisUke

Listening to the US is like listening to a skipping record. No offense.

Problem is, US thinks they are always right, telling everyone how to run their own country when clearly they got some issues as well. This economic crisis will humble a few people to say the very least.

Funny when Hillary Clinton visited China, she hardly mentioned human rights (well you can't put food on the table with human rights), it was more towards "please buy more US treasury or else", in a pleasant way of cause. At the end of the day, money talks.

[YukisUke]

Originally Posted by kirakira

Problem is, US thinks they are always right, telling everyone how to run their own country when clearly they got some issues as well. This economic crisis will humble a few people to say the very least.

Funny when Hillary Clinton visited China, she hardly mentioned human rights (well you can't put food on the table with human rights), it was more towards "please buy more US treasury or else", in a pleasant way of cause. At the end of the day, money talks.

Well said, brother. Well said. The US doesn't give a damn about anyone but themselves, sorry to say.

[kirakira]

Originally Posted by YukisUke

Well said, brother. Well said. The US doesn't give a damn about anyone but themselves, sorry to say.

Nothing wrong with that, every country should act in her best interest. But US likes to tell other people how to run their own country when they have issues themselves, that's where things go south.

[cridgit001]

Originally Posted by kirakira

Subprime loans rings a bell. The US government actively encouraged high risk lending, i.e. leading $$$ to people to buy houses when they can barely afford to pay the repayment. When the interest rate go up, and housing prices stunted, a lot of these people were forced to default, and it pretty much went down hill from there. All of a sudden, the banks are finding that the houses they lend $300,000 have as collateral suddenly is only worth half as much even after they call the debt collector, and things just snow balled from there. This sort of stuff happens but not to this scale.

The other one is wild speculation of oil and other resources. $150 a barrel... geez.

Anyway do some research on the current financial crisis and everything will be clear.

From what you described, it was a problem inside the country. I fail to see how the rest of the world grinded to a halt unless they were doing the same thing. How did government encourage it? The only encouraging I can see is by no regulation which then at that point, it just comes down to the greed of the individual companies which just to happen so be massive. That built upon poor spending habits built upon the thought of "I just need another credit card".

About the oil thing, one cannot ignore that China will put a hefty strain on resources in addition to the US. Speculation was a big issue I realize that but when the dust settles(it pretty much has at this point given that oil is like what, $40 a barrel I think) it will creep back up over a $100 simply because global demand will go up due to not just China and the US but India aswell(they will take longer obviously but their population is also over a billion like China).

[YukisUke]

Originally Posted by kirakira

Nothing wrong with that, every country should act in her best interest. But US likes to tell other people how to run their own country when they have issues themselves, that's where things go south.

Correction- North, South, East, and West. LMFAO!

[cridgit001]

I would like to say that energy wise for the US, its improving because in my back yard(Texas), I have seen more wind farms than I can count.

[YukisUke]

Originally Posted by cridgit001

I would like to say that energy wise for the US, its improving because in my back yard(Texas), I have seen more wind farms than I can count.

That's groovy.

[fluffy0000]

Subprime loans to poor people who could'nt afford them is not gonna fly dudes? Over here in the US Fox News and O'Rielly and other right wing pundits are shoveling this same 'garbage'. Blamining the US subprime meltdown
doe'snt even translate in the US economy due to the fact Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac only represented 13-14% capital in the residential mortgage market here in the USA. note WSJ/NYTimes/CSPAN.
Pls. try harder to blame someone else for Japans economic policy of manufactering TV's and Cars when people had stopped buying these. Refer UK Guardian article from Feb.19/2009 about Japans economy
"A general election must be held by October at the latest, and could be forced much sooner. The same outfit - the Liberal Democratic party, which is actually a conservative group - has run the country for the whole of the past half century, barring nine months in 1993. The LDP survived even the country's stagnation during the 1990s, when Japan's financial crash destroyed its banking system."

[kirakira]

Originally Posted by cridgit001

From what you described, it was a problem inside the country. I fail to see how the rest of the world grinded to a halt unless they were doing the same thing. How did government encourage it? The only encouraging I can see is by no regulation which then at that point, it just comes down to the greed of the individual companies which just to happen so be massive. That built upon poor spending habits built upon the thought of "I just need another credit card".

Ehh... that'll take a while to explain. In a nutshell, we live in a global economy and this money lent by banks is then sold off as high risk security to other firms around the world so the risk could be spread. After the mortage crisis broke out in the US, not only the US banks but banks around the world suddenly find that their asset base has pretty much evaporated, i.e. their money literally disappeared as the assets backing these security is now worth only half. What this does is it dries up the global credit (i.e. money) supply, drives up the cost of borrowing, and some banks, like Lehmans Brothers, had so much of this bad assets, that they had to file bankruptcy (with Merrill Lynch and a few others but later rescued).

This jitters the stockmarket since these banks are HUGE, for hundreds of billions of dollars just to disappear, it does nobody any confidence. Banks around the world are finding it harder to get money, so they can't lend to businesses, a lot of which need this credit to survive (and when they can't get this credit, they fold). Add that to collapse of resource prices, a lot of mining companies find that their cost to produce is actually more than the current spot price, have also had their stock prices battered up to 95% and some just went bust as well. This has a domino effect on other sectors of the economy as stockmarket crashes, wealth decreases, people spend less, collapsed demand, you get the picture.