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Japanese editorial excerpts -3-+
(Japan Economic Newswire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) TOKYO, Aug. 19_(Kyodo) _ Selected editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:
NEW ECONOMIC GROWTH PATTERN NEEDED (IHT/Asahi as translated from the Japanese-language Asahi Shimbun's editorial published Aug. 18)
It has been a full year since the world financial market was first rocked by defaults of U.S. subprime mortgage loans. It seems that the fallout will continue to reverberate even further.
During the past year, the global economy has changed drastically.
U.S. consumers had borrowed money based on expectations that the value of their houses would rise. Their spending frenzy helped buoy even Japan's economy, as well as newly emerging economies. However, once the U.S. economy started to sputter out, the world economy began to spin backward. The status of the dollar as the key currency has also begun to erode.
If we look back at the path the U.S. economy followed in the post-Cold War era, it has been in a cycle of one bubble economy followed by a burst.
The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis is the result of trying to overcome problems caused by a bubble economy by creating another bubble.
The U.S. housing bubble also fueled the rise of property prices in Europe, while newly emerging economies became somewhat overheated because of their expanded exports to the United States and other factors.
The abnormal spike in prices of resources and foods is also probably yet another kind of bubble. It seems as if the conditions to create a bubble are embedded in the global economy.
Our task from now is to rid the economy of this problematic makeup and switch to a steady and well-grounded growth trend. In other words, economic growth must be achieved with real, solid measures, not money games.
Constricting the bubble would require enormous amounts of adjustment. Even if newly emerging economies, which are in a unique growth process, were to play a major role in shoring up the world economy, they would still lack the power to push it forward.
Moreover, we must brace ourselves for the prospect of the U.S. dollar gradually losing its role as the key currency.
The world economy will need a new growth engine to stop relying on bubble economies and especially to place advanced economies firmly on a growth trajectory.
That plan may require turning issues like the environment and aging--problems considered hindrances to economic growth--into positive, factors contributing to growth.
How about Japan's economy? Since the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, Japan can be said to have fought and toiled to find a new growth engine while suffering under the weight of a budget deficit.
If we can quickly tap into a new pattern of growth, we will have an edge in the global race. That will also amount to contributing to the global economy. (Aug. 19)
Copyright ? 2008 Kyodo News International, Inc.
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