Winning in Maui: TPP Ministerial Negotiations Fail, with No Date Set for the Next Round
Winning a battle in the long campaign against TPP: It was “domestic politics” that preserved our national sovereignty
Read more...Category Archives: Japan
Good News on TPP, as Senate Passes Fast Track Bill with Human Trafficking Poison Pill
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Senator Bob Menendez just served an even bigger plate than he intended via an amendment to Obama’s Fast Track bill that thanks to some Republican help, didn’t get modified into mere symbolism. Ooops!
Read more...Will the TransPacific Partnership Agreement Go into the Deep Freeze?
The TransPacific Partnership is far from a done deal,. Delay in securing Congressional approval for Fast Track has high odds of throwing a fatal wrench in the overseas timing.
Read more...Give the Democratic Trade Turncoats Hell Over Fast Track Vote
The real fight against Fast Track authorization will take place in the House. but the Senate sellouts should be made to feel the wrath of their constituents.
Read more...Obama Bribes Abe to Support the TPP by Unleashing Japanese Military
Obama’s bribe to Abe, of a more muscular Japanese military, has won him over but won’t play as well in Japan and will go down worse in China.
Read more...Satyajit Das: Two Views of Japan’s Setting Sun
Das discusses two recent books on Japan, and both provide windows on how Japan is coping with its now lost two decades. One of them is by Tag Murphy, who I met in my days in Japan and has long been a very insightful commentator. As I said at the Atlantic Economy conference, rather than trying to “jump start the economy,” which would take more radical restructuring than they are willing to engage in, the top wealthy might be better served to worry about managing low growth better. And for its many flaws, egalitarian Japan has muddled through a far more severe bubble and bust with more grace than we have.
Read more...Robert Parenteau: The Large Fly in Krugman’s New Keynesian Soup
Why New Keynesians look a lot like Friedmaniacs.
Read more...How the Scammers Behind Virgin Gold Mining Corporation Bit Off More Than They Could Chew (I)
First in a series of posts exploring Virgin Gold, an immense ($2Bn?) pyramid scheme with a messy aftermath
Read more...Is the TransPacific Partnership Being Brought Back From the Dead?
With a new Republican Congress, and Obama himself a Republican who occasionally wears Democratic clothing, the Administration is making noise that the TransPacific Partnership and its ugly sister, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are moving forward in a serious way.
But the Administration tried that sort of messaging last year to keep up a sense of inevitability about these regulation-gutting, mislabeleed trade deals, when reality was very different. So where do things stand?
Read more...Can Abenomics Revive Japan’s Economy?
Most readers are skeptical of Abenomics, and for good reason. This post gives an accessible discussion of why it has not worked.
Read more...Japanese Politics: Still 猫に小判
Yves here. Readers asked our Japan-watcher Clive for his take on the snap election in Japan, where voting takes place this Sunday. Contrary to the norm for Japanese politics, there may be less here than meets the eye. In addition, Clive provides an update on Japanese media and official statements on the TransPacific Partnership negotiations.
Read more...Why is Anyone Surprised that Abenomics Failed?
In case you managed to miss it, there’s been a fair bit of hand-wringing over the fact that Japan has fallen back into a recession despite the supposedly heroic intervention called Abenomics, whose central feature was QE on steroids.
But Japan of all places should know that relying on the wealth effect to spur growth has always bombed in the long term.
Read more...Treasury Liquidity Freakout: Searching for a Market-Maker
As someone old enough to have done finance in the Paleolithic pre-personal computer era (yes, I did financial analysis using a calculator and green accountant’s ledger paper as a newbie associate at Goldman), investor expectations that market liquidity should ever and always be there seem bizarre, as well as ahistorical. Yet over the past month or two, there has been an unseemly amount of hand-wringing about liquidity in the bond market, both corporate bonds, and today, in a Financial Times story we’ll use as a point of departure, Treasuries.
These concerns appear to be prompted by worries about what happens if (as in when) bond investors get freaked out by the Fed finally signaling it is really, no really, now serious about tightening and many rush for the exits at once. The taper tantrum of summer 2013 was a not-pretty early warning and the central bank quickly lost nerve. The worry is that there might be other complicating events, like geopolitical concerns, that will impede the Fed’s efforts at soothing rattled nerves, or worse, that the bond market will gap down before the Fed can intercede (as if investors have a right to orderly price moves!).
Let’s provide some context to make sense of these pleas for ever-on liquidity.
Read more...What Makes Japan Bother With the TransPacific Partnership?
Yves here. We’ve been giving regular updates, with the considerable help of our man in Japan Clive, on how the the prospects for Japan signing up for the TransPacific Partnership look extremely slim. Mind you, “extremely slim” is not impossible, but the reason we deem the probability to be that low is that the Administration appears unwilling to bargain at all, let alone offer Japan some critical and large concessions that it requires to sign up. And since Japan is a linchpin to the entire deal, if Japan is a no-go, you can kiss the TransPacific Partnership goodbye.
These TransPacific Partnership discussions have also given yours truly, and even more so our real expert Clive, the opportunity to do some cross-cultural translating, which I personally enjoy. The Japanese are a sufficiently alien culture that you are forced to suspend or retrain your assumptions about how things work. So to watch the US Trade Representative, which along with the State Department, ought to be a US agency particularly attuned to how Japan needs special handling, instead do the equivalent of repeatedly step on a rake and get smacked in the face, is entertaining in a perverse way. How can they NOT know that what they are doing is counterproductive? And how can they NOT course correct when it should be obvious that what they are doing isn’t working?
However, even though, as we have discussed, the USTR has acted in a way almost guaranteed to offend the Japanese, the government has reasons for being cool on the TransPacific Partnership yet having to feign otherwise. And they aren’t terribly mysterious either, even though they do vary with US baseline assumptions.
Read more...Xi Upstages Obama, Puts Another Nail in TransPacific Partnership Coffin
In the wake of the Republican trouncing of the feckless Democrats in the midterm elections, there’s been an upsurge of calls of alarm on both the right and the left that the Administration and its big business allies in both parties will try to push the toxic trade deal known as the TransPacific Partnership through. That is in part due to Administration messaging that the talks are gaining momentum, as Obama asserted a mere two days ago. But not only do the negotiations appear to be going nowhere, but the Administration appears to be losing clout in the region as China is playing a considerably shrewder trade and investment game.
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