Japan’s New PM Warns Country At “Risk Of Collapse” Under Massive Debt Load
by ilene - June 11th, 2010 10:49 am
Japan’s New PM Warns Country At "Risk Of Collapse" Under Massive Debt Load
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
A week ago Hungary had the unfortunate mishap of telling the truth when it compared itself to Greece, resulting in a massive selloff of the Forint and leading to fresh lows for the euro. Today, it is Japan which is using the very same strategy in an attempt to devalue its own currency. So far it’s working.
The BBC reports that Naoto Kan has been a little truthier than the G-20 plenary sessions generally allow. We now look for the PM’s reign of truth to be even shorter than that of his thousands of predecessors during the past couple of years: "Naoto Kan, in his first major speech since taking over, said Japan needed a financial restructuring to avert a Greece-style crisis."Our country’s outstanding public debt is huge… our public finances have become the worst of any developed country," he said." Obviously, none of this is news. However, the market certainly does not appreciate when it is told that what it sees day after day in the non-mainstream media is actually the truth and nothing but the truth. What next – Tim Geithner coming out to say that a downgrade of the US is actually long overdue?
More from BBC:
After years of borrowing, Japan’s debt is twice its gross domestic product.
"It is difficult to continue our fiscal policies by heavily relying on the issuance of government bonds," said Mr Kan, Japan’s former finance minister.
"Like the confusion in the eurozone triggered by Greece, there is a risk of collapse if we leave the increase of the public debt untouched and then lose the trust of the bond markets," he said.
Yet, just like with the SNB’s CHF intervention, the market did not respond at all to this, at least so far. Do the HFT algos need a realism translator when they are not focusing on ephemeral data such as consumer confidence (the US consumer is confident that after once again cutting spending, they may eventually buy that 5th iPad at some point in the future). Or does nobody even care about any fundamentals anymore? Is the entire market a bubble chamber where one bout of buying or selling is all that’s needed to set off the appropriate algo engines?…