Japan Poised to Assist Wall Street Banks
January 16th, 2008The Matrix is robust. Look how so many nodes close ranks when a situation threatens to take it down.
Simple greed is another explanation that works well here.
Via: Telegraph:
The three wealthiest Japanese finance houses are set to step into the worsening sub-prime carnage as the “silent investment partners” of Wall Street and Europe’s stricken banking titans.
Senior sources at the “big three” Tokyo megabanks told The Times that they had readied a combined cashpile of as much as $10 billion (£5 billion) and were open to negotiation with any struggling Wall Street bank that approached them for a cash infusion.
Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFJ), Mitsui Sumitomo Financial Group (SMFG) and Mizuho Financial – banks that have been scarred only very lightly by the sub-prime crisis in the United States – are understood to have already opened preliminary talks with several American firms.
One MUFJ insider said that his firm was planning to compete directly with the leading Asian sovereign wealth funds as a long-term investor in the troubled American banks. The Japanese banks, flush with cash and desperate to find ways of raising their return on capital, are keen to become central players in what some predict will be an all-Asian solution to the sub-prime woes contorting America and Europe.
i get the impression that this is driven to a greater extent by latent nationalism, and particularly by the ever-present fear (paranoia?)of being overshadowed by China.
i also really wonder how many of these top Japanese bankers grasp the full implications of this slo-mo implosion of the US credit system.
the media coverage in Japan generally seems quite naive. And considering what happened to Japanese banks in the mid-to-late 90s, I suppose schadenfreude plays not too small a part, either…
“jockeying for position among the various elite factions” may be the best way to describe this sort of thing.