Brian Gongol
Landslide win for Japan's opposition party
The US and Japan ought to have a very cozy relationship in the years ahead. The obvious security rivalry between the two (World War II) is long distant in the past, and today Japan relies heavily upon American military might to protect it from two shared security rivals: China and North Korea. So anything that keeps the United States powerful is of great importance to Japan. That's going to be very valuable to the US in coming years as it deals with several problems. The US has a massive debt problem which has lately been subsidized heavily by export cash flooding the Chinese market. But with China making noises like it doesn't want to go on buying US debt forever, America is going to need a combination of lending money from Japan (it's already the second-largest creditor to the US) and some serious lesons in frugality (Japan's household savings rate is, embarrassingly, many times larger than America's - even after the recent spike to a 4% or 5% savings rate in the US -- which includes all savings of every type, including retirement funds). Japan may actually save too much in its own right, but considering the tight linkage between the two economies, Japan may be like America's economic conjoined twin, carrying some of the burden of our non-savings and enabling us to go on longer than economic gravity would otherwise permit. Japan will also have a lot to teach the US about adapting to an older average age -- which they've reached perhaps 10 years earlier. Knowledge transfera from Japan will aid the US in dealing with an increasingly automated manufacturing sector (contrary to popular belief, the US manufacturing sector has never been larger in terms of output -- it just doesn't employ as many people as it once did, and never will again). Japan, in turn, still needs to gain an appreciation for risk that is more systemic to the US: The excessively cozy relationship between the Japanese industrial conglomerates and their government is good for those companies in the short to medium term, but it hurts them and the economy as a whole in the long term (see what happened to the South Korean economy and the chaebol in the late 1990s). Oversized, "too big to fail" companies financed heavily by sweetheart debt deals and protected by a government racket are destined to hit rocky times without the right tools to recover. Ironically, much of what's been done in the name of "economic stimulus" in the US recently has been too much like the keiretsu/chaebol model and not enough like a free market. It's going to be an interesting 50 years ahead.
"Fraudulent conveyance": Bank robbery without the ski mask
Some of the investors who have lost a lot of money in the Tribune Co. bankruptcy are accusing the guy at the top of "fraudulent conveyance," or borrowing money he never expected to be able to pay back. Sounds eerily similiar to the actual debt being racked up by the Federal government on top of mountains of entitlement promises we have no clear capacity to pay in the future. Were Tribune lenders fooled any more than American taxpayers have been? Or have the parties involved been entirely complicit in schemes and promises to make wealth out of thin air?
Cancer research: Way more important than global warming
Congress, activists, and others have been vocal and vigilant about global warming in a way that hasn't been matched by volume over many other issues in quite some time. But a recent discovery that sheds new light on how to search for anti-cancer drugs also reveals how little we appear to actually know about how cancers form and grow. Some researchers think we're treating many cancers in a way that won't ever really defeat them, and though others disagree, nobody appears to have a certain answer. Why is it, then, that it's politically sexy to battle over global warming (which may or may not have any substantial human cause, and which may or may not ultimately cause an array of uncertain outcomes) but not as sexy to do everything in our power to get answers using every tool in our societal arsenal to overcome a health risk that will directly affect one in three Americans? Shouldn't a certain risk facing a near-majority of the voting public be a more significant issue than one which may or may not come to pass over the next 75 years?
