Tan Kin Lian's Blog: Worrying lesson from Japan

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Worrying lesson from Japan

The headlines of a news report said, "GDP up, exports up" but the sub-headline says "Jobless increases, wages depressed".

I am afraid that this will be the situation in many countries around the world, including America and Singapore. It is the consequence of the "globalisation" model, weak protection of workers and consumers, and the wide disparity of income. This is why Singapore, Hong Kong and America have the largest ratio of billionaires to population.

Even Japan, which is more socialist in its governance, is suffering indirectly from globalisation. This is why wages continues to fall, and many people continue to be unemployed.

How can the world be more prosperous, if wealth is not shared fairly and justly? How many people should go into poverty and debt, to create more billionaires for a few?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...: Over in Taiwan, unemployment rate is now at an all time high of 6.1% with wages comparable to 1996 level (imagine!), using purchasing power parity. Life is very tough for the Taiwanese...; September 24, 2009 9:18 AM
Anonymous said...: hi mr tan...

the following is an article abt the challenges and gloom doom ahead for the economy...

the real problem is not globalisation but printing money and gahmen excessive spending to stimulate the economy :

http://mises.org/story/3697

ym; September 24, 2009 9:33 AM
Anonymous said...: UK unemployment is also at highest level for 14 years.; September 24, 2009 9:53 AM
Anonymous said...: Visits tokyo first time for 2 days and expect a city like Hk (which I travel to frequently). Though read so much about high unemployment and bad economic numbers, the city has very high consuming power observed from the busy queues in shops, supermarkets and expensive gourmet cafes! Japan is unique as they have a internal economy to support the industries. Citizens pay for quality goods and the mentality of brand-consciously is highly practiced but their local products are equal in quality, price and service.

Citizens also make a lot of effort in their jobs, and appear proud of their work. We see different age group in the service industry. Eg. I am impressed when a hotel conceige staff made effort to make enlargement of train schedules after he ask if I can see the very small printing. He looks in his 60s and very well dressed (though it is a uniform, it is well pressed and he walked straight and not sloppy.

We need to worry in Singapore if we do not have immigrants who work and live in town because our population is v small and our people do not believe in paying good money for quality. It is a vicious cycle. people do not work properly on a product because he thinks no one appreciates the good work and he gets paid measly for the sloppy work. He will have less money in his pocket and when he spends, he look for cheaper goods. Moral of the story as a whole...

Why immigrants of all levels? To spread out the consumption of different goods in our market!

When you perform a task to perfection, give yourself time to consolidated over time, you will get the yield you deserve.

We need a society that performs this way...is this honesty and integrity we have been talking all this while!; September 24, 2009 12:04 PM
Anonymous said...: I agree with TKL that globalisation is the culprit of the current situation, the printing money by central bank is just the desperate attempt to veer us away from the deflationary depression seen in the 30s, and I am inclined to think that this will result in a Japanese style of deflationary depression - which is to save companies first to avoid the massive unemployment seen during Great Depressions.

Globalistion actually became intensive in late 1980s due to the collapse of communism in China, Russia and Eastern Bloc countries. These countries, in order to jumpstart their economy, had given a lot of initiatives (and ignored workers' welfare) to lure foreign investment, and suddenly we had cheap goods available produced by these countries. Such cheap goods did not induce inflation (since supply seemed unlimited), we had a lot of easy money as people had more cash available, people felt rich, consumed/invested a lot and debts were accumulated. So if you follow Dow Jones stock chart, you will find that since 90s the index has been rising at a steep ascent.

But with the financial crisis, banks have to pull back credit and bubble has burst for this unsustainable consumer demand. For the consumers (esp US and Europe), they need to save to pay off the debts and thus consumption drops, this in turn causes excess capacity for the companies. So what do the companies do? For those which hitherto expanded too fast and borrowed a lot, they have no choice but to retrench. Those retrenched cannot consume anymore, so we have this deadly spiral of falling consumer demand -> unemployment increases-> consumer demand falls further etc that will take a long time to reach equilibrium (similar to Japan in the 90s) because of zombie banks and companies.; September 24, 2009 12:05 PM
Anonymous said...: "How can the world be more prosperous..."

Right now it seems that prosperity comes not from producing something in exchange for something else produced by someone else. Prosperity nowadsys comes from buying something, repackage it into something else and sell it at a massive profit. Like financial products, houses, shares etc, people just become prosperous buying and selling such things, or just blowing more air into the balloon. Some suckers must eventually pay for it.; September 24, 2009 1:52 PM
Anonymous said...: When I was a hospital worker,
staff are expected to exchange a gift before Christmas.(I am not a Christian).

I gave 2 packages of rice as a gift for exchange.

The collegue who recieves my gift was rather angry !

Other collegue thought I am short circuit!
My immediate boss was not happy too!; September 24, 2009 5:38 PM
Parka said...: Unemployment will continue to be high. Reason is simple, jobs that took months and years to create only took the recession days and weeks to destroy.; September 25, 2009 12:30 AM