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Dogs and DemonsInstead, they go underground, re-emerging in surprising forms elsewhere. At a bank in Tokyo, you can make 10 plus 10 equal 30 if you like – but somewhere far away, at a pension fund in Osaka, for example, it may be that 10 plus 10 will now equal only 15. Or even farther away, implications of this equation may require that a stretch of seashore in Hokkaido must be cemented over. The Ministry of Finance did not get away with ignoring all the classical rules, for the bankruptcy of pension funds, insurance companies, and banks, the stagnant stock market, six years of zero-to-negative growth, and millions of people in debt to loan sharks are cold, hard facts that cannot be ignored. The argument over whether there are laws of money has to do partly with what sacrifices you are willing to take to maintain an «unscientific» system. Japan is willing to drive its national debt to stratospheric levels, flatten its mountains and rivers, and bleed its savers dry in order to support its system. So the system endures. Back in the seventeenth century, when Saikaku penned his racy stories of townspeople in the cities of Osaka and Kyoto, shopkeepers knew differently ...» |
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