Japanese housewives & American debt
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, explains to an audience that Japanese housewives have funded America’s debt for over 30 years:
Only last year, fiscal year, did the Chinese even come close to the Japanese, and they haven’t surpassed them yet, because let me tell you about another phenomenon in Japan that funds our debt: it’s called Japanese housewives. Japanese housewives answer to no central banker, to no finance minister, to no central authority whatsoever, and they have US$14 trillion in assets. Talk about a sovereign wealth fund. Japanese housewives in the culture that they live in learned to use the Internet, learned to get smart about investments in the stockmarket in particular—and I’m talking globally, not just US, but principally the US—and made some really good investment decisions. They now sit on $14 trillion. So when you add that to the $670 billion or so of US debt that the Japanese bought last year, it surpasses the $802 billion the Chinese bought. So the Japanese, in exchange for a public good called “national security”, which included a nuclear umbrella—and that meant they didn’t have to spend more than 1 percent of their GDP on their military—the Japanese traded us the ability to spend beyond our means to astronomical levels….
[hat tip to Brian]
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