Word: moris
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stocks to hell and back and bringing Wall Street along for the ride. For reminding us all over again that the global economy is only as strong as its weakest superpower, and that if Japan tumbles into the abyss we might all take the plunge, Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori is TIME.com's person of the week...
...Mori started off the week in full-on kabuki mode, denying Monday that he'd told a weekend meeting of party elders that he'd resign. The denial, universally deemed mere lame-duck face-saving in advance of upcoming summits with George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, tipped the Japanese markets over into panic mode and sent the Nikkei 500 plunging to lows not seen since 1985, the long-ago days when Japan was an economic juggernaut to be emulated...
...faintest of heartbeats; it was shackled by deflation, record unemployment and self-feeding consumer recalcitrance; its banks were on the verge of bankruptcy and its government was drowning in debt. With the U.S. in a slowdown of its own, Japan's exports couldn't keep it hanging on, and Mori's latest missteps seemed to prove that the country's deeply sclerotic government had neither the will nor the agility to do what needed to be done...
...Black Tuesdays with Mori...
...then there was hope, in the form of more kabuki: the lame-duck Mori urging his ministers to tackle the banking system's $600 billion bad-loan problem, and finance minister Kiichi Miyazawa promising fiscal guarantees for a bailout scheme that many wonder whether the government can afford. But the task forces are meeting and ministers are huddling, and in Japan, that constitutes dramatic action. In the financial markets there was hope that Mori's puppetmasters in the beleaguered Liberal Democratic Party might just be moved to vigor in the cause of self-preservation...