schow@bcarh61.bnr.ca (Stanley T.H. Chow) (11/11/89)
In article <14027@grebyn.com> ted@grebyn.com (Ted Holden) writes: > >Some of the gems of wisdom in "the book" include the following: > >2. From a chapter titled "The decline of an America which can > only see ten minutes ahead": "Americans make money by playing > money games, by simply moving money back and forth. When > people forget how to produce goods, and that appears to be the > case in America, they will not be able to supply themselves > even with their most basic needs." > But do you agree? As a Canadian, I certainly see lots of evidence. Just check out Fortune & Forbs (the magazines). Americans *are* getting rich by shuffling money. Japenese get rich by making things. >3. [...] The U.S. wants everybody to buy American made > semiconductors and these are even being used in Japan, but the > number of defective ones is amazingly high... It leads me to > believe there is no hope for the U.S. > Again, do you dispute this? American goods *are* of low quality (on the whole). Think about what happens. When a Japanese manufacturer have an unpopular product, they do market reseach to redesign it for the intended marktet. When a American manufacturer have an unpopular product, they scream at congress to *force* the Japenese to buy. *Everyone* agrees that Japenese have higher quality semiconductor products. The answer is to raise American quality. The major American manufacturers (electronic or otherwise) are all working hard to improve quality. Are you saying that instead, they should force the Japanese to lower their quality? A joke that I heard: An American company started to buy transistor/IC's from a Japanese manufacturer and specified an amazingly low failure rate (or what they thought was amazingly low). When they receiced the first shipment, the transistor/IC's were seperated into a big pile and a small pile. A note attached to the small pile said: "We normally do not ship bad parts, but your order required this particular failure rate. So we have seperated the bad parts for your convenience." Probably not real; but it does point out the attitude difference. > > I have been forced to review my own attitude towards Japan in >recent years for a number of reasons, the most critical of which >might just be the Japanese approach to market share and the way in >which they use the vast American market; in too many areas, they >seem to be able to use our home market as a springboard, and make >money globally by losing money here. It is probably true that few >if any American firms will ever again achieve the market share (and >economy of scale) to compete with the Japanese other than by our >throwing them (the Japanese) out. > This is truly amazing! Why the hell do you say no American firms can do what the Japanese did? What kind of attitude is that? Economy of scale? The Americans owned *everything* after WW II. They were the *only* people with any scale. They were the people with *all* the technology. The short-sighted management threw away their lead in technology and economy of scale. Don't you care about investments? Japanese invested a ton of money when then Americans moved to real estate or stocks. Now you are complaining that the Japanese is starting to make their investment pay dividends. > > By the same token, especially given the unfolding end of >communism, the Christian nations of Eastern Europe, Poland, ^^^^^^^^^ >Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria, and others are very obviously the ones >in need of access to our markets now and possibly for the next >forty years. What worked for Japan might work equally as well for >them. > Oh, so the non-christian Indians and Africans can just go screw themself? Or are you just bashing Japan because they are not "Christian"? Stanley Chow BitNet: schow@BNR.CA BNR UUCP: ..!psuvax1!BNR.CA.bitnet!schow (613) 763-2831 ..!utgpu!bnr-vpa!bnr-rsc!schow%bcarh61 Me? Represent other people? Don't make them laugh so hard.
exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) (11/16/89)
In article <1353@bnr-rsc.UUCP> schow%BNR.CA.bitnet@relay.cs.net (Stanley T.H. Chow) writes: >As a Canadian, I certainly see lots of evidence. Just check out >Fortune & Forbs (the magazines). Americans *are* getting rich by >shuffling money. Japenese get rich by making things. [Lots more (which I believe) about how the Americans had the lead, threw it away, and let the Japanese move in, deleted.] We see similar effects in the UK (which owned most of the world a century or so ago...). The salient effect, I think, is that the ability to make money by shuffling money actually inhibits the research necessary for making things. If a company invests any sizeable percentage of its gross profits into long-term research, it reduces their immediate net profit. This, for various arcane reasons to do with the stock market, makes them vulnerable to leveraged takeovers and subsequent asset stripping. (To oversimplify a bit, the problem is that stock prices tend to move so they are related to earnings. If you have low earnings and high capital value, your stock will tend to be priced at an artificially low level. So, you can buy the stock, take control, sell off the capital, and make money.) Thus (except for very big companies) making sizeable investments in the future is likely to cause a company not to have one. Only research which has immediate payoff is safe. Maybe the answer is to go back to the original concept of 'stock shares'. In the East India Tea Company days, for example, you couldn't sell stock you held to someone else -- and shares were relatively short-term. A company would sell shares in a specific endeavour -- e.g. shares in a trip of the clipper Fred to Burma to trade in spices -- and when that venture was completed, the profits would be distributed back to the shareholders by the mechanism of the company buying back the shares. This provided the useful effect of 'stock market as a way for companies to raise money for their activities' without the damaging effect of 'stock market as a way to make money by shuffling money'. Or, maybe some other answer is needed. (And maybe, if anyone wants to argue this, it ought to move to misc.misc or somewhere else. I've started it there, just take comp.misc out of the header.) -- Paul Smee | JANET: Smee@uk.ac.bristol Computer Centre | BITNET: Smee%uk.ac.bristol@ukacrl.bitnet University of Bristol | Internet: Smee%uk.ac.bristol@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk (Phone: +44 272 303132) | UUCP: ...!uunet!ukc!gdr.bath.ac.uk!exspes