

Life After the Bubble: How Japan Lost a Decade  - bootload
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/weekinreview/19impoco.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

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marvin
As far as the stock market goes, the US has pretty much lost a decade already:
both the Dow Jones and S&P500 indexes have bobbed up and down 50% since 1998.
(The same goes for the NASDAQ, by the way). This indicates the the markets
have priced in the shenanigans already: there has been economic activity, but
broadly speaking it hasn't been based on wealth creation. You have produced as
many useless things (houses that no one will live in, for instance) as useful
things.

When you've been living a lie all this time, some pain is bound to follow. For
philosophical purposes the difference between recession and debt-fueled boom
is small: the only real difference is that people get paid..money which must
be paid back later. It is, weirdly enough, an economic zero-sum game. But now
it's over, and there's just one way to go on. Maybe there will be a hangover,
but these things are temporary.

I think it is wrong to draw parallels to Japan. Extrapolating trends and
learning from history almost never works with economics. There are too many
random (i.e. unknown) variables. For all we know, the US could get its act
together in half a year. You've still got the most powerful economy in the
world, it has just been focusing on the wrong things for a while. I'm with
Buffett.

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rgrieselhuber
Japan has its own issues that have kept it in a virtually stagnant economy for
the last 10-15 years. The entire country's natural tendency is to fold back
into itself and create pockets of isolation from the outside world - a
tendency that has repeated itself for most of their history. It's difficult to
draw large scale economic parallels like this without discussing the
underlying DNA of the culture supporting the economy in question.

The US also has some serious issues, culturally and economically (duh) but I
honestly think we're in better shape. There is of course a very real
possibility that we're heading into a time of depression that could last
years, but the spark of innovation seems alive and well to me. It may be a
little misplaced at the moment but the market has its own ways of correcting
that.

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ivanstojic
I'm seriously irked by login-required policy of NY Times :-(

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Herring
bugmenot doesn't work on nytimes?

edit: it does - <http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com>

install this extension - <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349>

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ivanstojic
Thanks! I've used BMN sporadically through bookmarklets, but this is very
nice.

