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...Minister provided YouTube-quality evidence of what most Japanese already suspect: its current leaders are looking increasingly unprepared to deal with what may be the country's greatest challenge since the end of World War II. Japan's economy, the world's second largest, is contracting at the fastest rate among all developed nations. GDP growth in the last quarter shrank at an alarming annualized rate of 12.7%, Japan's worst showing since the 1974 oil shock. But instead of taking vigorous steps to counteract a worsening recession, Prime Minister Taro Aso is lurching from one embarrassing gaffe...
...Indeed, the only thing falling faster than Japanese industrial output is Aso's popularity, which according to a recent Nippon Television survey has sunk to a 9.7% approval rate, the worst for a Japanese Prime Minister since 2001. Even fellow LDP stalwart Junichiro Koizumi, the influential former Prime Minister, has publicly criticized Aso's blunders, calling them "appalling" and "laughable." Nakagawa's Yeltsin-like meltdown "is one more nail in Aso's coffin," says Robert Dujarric, director at Temple University's Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies. "It shows that he's incompetent and so is his administration...
...latest economic indicators are dire: exports were down nearly 14% in the fourth quarter, a record three-month drop; with U.S. consumers shutting their wallets, the big guns of corporate Japan - among them Toyota and Sony - are forecasting historic losses and firing thousands of workers; Japan's unemployment rate has spiked to 4.4%, a level not seen in more than five decades. "We have a once-in-a-hundred-year crisis and the policy response is not even average," says Jesper Koll, president and CEO of Tantallon Research Japan. "The people running the show are not politicians, not independent...
There's a motorcycle-taxi stand near my home in Bangkok, and many of the drivers' hands are dirty. Not from urban grime or motor oil, but from newsprint. Fueled by a growing literacy rate and press reforms in some parts of the continent, Asia is enjoying what may be the world's last great newspaper boom. Eight of the world's 10 biggest paid-for daily newspapers are printed in Asia, according to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). The largest national newspaper markets? China, India and Japan. (The U.S. is a distant fourth...
...scholar at the Brookings Institution and then as head of the Congressional Budget Office. No long-term budget plan can get around the massive surge in costs that comes with rising medical-care prices and the aging of the baby boomers. "If health-care costs grow at the same rate over the next four decades as they did over the past four decades, you're up to 20% of gross domestic product by 2050," he claims. Translation: left unchecked, the government won't have money to spend on anything but health care...