Word: japanized
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...Perhaps most surprisingly, American consumers are continuing to spend, regardless: automobile purchases are sluggish, but monthly retail sales rose by a higher-than-forecast 0.9% from November to December. "I'm not prepared to bet against the American consumer. That's a highly dangerous proposition," says Jesper Koll, chief Japan economist for Merrill Lynch...
...region far less dependent on America's appetite for Asian exports. Today, only 16.5% of Asia's exports are sold in the U.S., down from 25.5% in 1993. Yet there are significant regional differences. Jonathan Anderson, chief economist for Asia at Swiss bank UBS, says Singapore, Malaysia and Japan remain more vulnerable if tapped-out Americans start to shop less, given that their own domestic spending is relatively weak; by contrast, China's consumption is rising steadily, propelled partly by housing demand. He points out that China wasn't hit as badly as other Asian countries by the U.S. downturn...
...firm has used currency transactions to hedge against the risk of a weaker dollar. Trumpf's strong sales growth is in large part the fruit of geographical diversification by the company: it established a subsidiary in the U.S. way back in 1969 and opened an office in Japan eight years later. It's currently investing in facilities in the Czech Republic, Mexico and South Korea. "Our main competition used to be in the U.S., but it has disappeared there and now it's Japan," Leibinger-Kamm?ller says. Still, Trumpf uses its U.S. manufacturing operations as a springboard not just...
...triggered by any number of lurking dangers-an adverse geopolitical event such as an act of aggression against Iran, say, or the implosion of a massively leveraged hedge fund, or a loss of enthusiasm for the popular but perilous yen carry trade, whereby speculators borrow money cheaply in Japan's currency and then use it to bet on higher-return assets around the world. If that rich source of global liquidity were to dry up, the impact would be far greater than today's sanguine investors realize...
...company in Guangzhou in 1906. But when the Communist Party took power in China in 1949, exports from China slowed to a trickle. Hong Kong then became a formidable manufacturing hub in its own right?until the colony's growing wealth (its per-capita income is second only to Japan's in Asia) began to impede growth. By the 1970s, costs were rising so quickly that Hong Kong became uncompetitive in basic manufacturing compared with newly emerging economies elsewhere in Asia. Geography saved the day. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping began opening China to foreign investment, and Hong Kong manufacturers decamped...