Word: portfolios
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past decade, Shojiro Suzuki has watched his wealth slowly slip away. The 861-sq.-ft. house in Tokyo that he bought 13 years ago for 60 million yen ($492,000)? It's worth half that now. The stock portfolio worth 16 million yen ($131,000) back in the late 1980s? A paltry 3 million yen ($25,000) now. His salary of 8.5 million yen ($70,000)? The same for 10 years. To make matters worse, last week the stock ticker in his office's front window taunted him every time he walked by. On his way out Monday...
...pale man with graying hair and an easygoing smile, Suzuki has spent his entire adult life at his firm, working from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. daily. He joined the company out of high school, in 1974, drawn to the firm because it managed his father's portfolio. "This is more serious, much worse than when the bubble burst," Suzuki says, referring to 1990, when the bottom fell out of Japan's stock market. "We cannot see any future...
...that time at hand? A lot of people think so. "The broad economy is not as bad as the technology economy. More people are starting to wake up to the fact that this is a technology problem," says Thomas McManus, portfolio strategist at Banc of America Securities in New York City. Certainly there are hopeful signs. Consumer-sentiment figures released by the University of Michigan Friday suggest that the pessimism may be leveling off. Car and home sales have held up reasonably well, drawing down inventories, a critical issue. Consumers have been refinancing their homes at the fastest clip...
...main one: the Japan bubble was built on rising real estate values. Banks were heavily exposed through mortgages and commercial-property loans. The U.S. bubble was in a narrow sector of stocks. Some banks are exposed through private equity investments; but for the most part, even if your portfolio tanked, your bank doesn't have much at risk. Healthy banks are vital to a healthy economy...
...stakes are almost total. Never before, Wall Street yelps, have the market's fortunes been so entwined with Main Street's. Never before has the portfolio had so much hold over the wallet, and never before has so much broad-based American wealth been created and destroyed in so abrupt a lurch. The Wall Street contention is simple: These are again troubled global times, and the I-feel-rich American consumers who supported the U.S. economy through the Asian, Russian and hedge-fund tremors are on the brink of feeling very poor, and are acting accordingly...