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THE COMING KIWI DOLLAR CRASH
Mr. Watanabe is a well-paid, middle-ranking executive in a foodstuffs distribution business in Nagoya with a lot of disposable income. Like most of his compatriots and unlike most New Zealanders, he’s a saver who likes to invest some of his money in liquid assets such as bank deposits, Bank of Japan bonds and other conventional instruments. Trouble is, for the last four years, it’s hardly been worth Mr. Watanabe’s while to put his spare cash into his own country’s banks. Interest rates on deposit accounts are low and the Bank of Japan, alone among the big central banks, has paid practically nothing on its bonds. Its governors have their reasons, as we see later, but the Bank of Japan’s zero-rate policy left Mr. Watanabe and millions of other thrifty Japanese with a problem. Namely, how to get a decent return.
A big part of their solution, as NZ finance minister Michael Cullen knows only too well, was to buy New Zealand dollars in what we call uridashi – or ‘bargain basement’– bonds. It’s known as the yen carry trade. By borrowing yen at a paltry rate of around 0.30 per cent and buying kiwis paying around seven per cent, Mr. Watanabe and his fellow retail investors are clocking up a handsome 6.7 per cent return before transaction costs. Read more here...
CAMILLE PAGLIA, DEFENDER OF THE WEST
Dr. Paglia, a professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts who made her name in 1990 with the publication of "Sexual Personae," is no conservative - in fact, she's an atheist libertarian Democrat who extols the virtues of pagan sexuality. But she's downright Kirkian in her contempt for the egalitarian instinct and in her roaring disgust at modernity's disinterest in, or even contempt for, Western tradition.
And she holds her own tribe - American humanities professors - chiefly responsible.
"I remain concerned about the compulsive denigration of the West and the reductiveness so many leading academics in the humanities have toward their own tradition," she tells me. "They reduce it all to the lowest common denominator of racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia. That's an extremely small-minded way of looking at culture and a betrayal of the career mission of these educators, whose job is to educate students in our culture." Read more here...
AUGUST ISSUE BOOK REVIEWS
Michael Morrissey reviews 'Infidel': Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born woman who rose to be a member of
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