`Worst Case' Nuclear Disaster Hangs on Unlikely Events. There is a 10% probability still.

For Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s stricken nuclear reactors to release catastrophic amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, a rare chain of events needs to happen.

Averting a full-scale meltdown -- which scientists say isn’t likely -- depends on cooling the uranium-containing rods at Fukushima Dai-Ichi’s Reactor No. 2, said S.K. Malhotra, a scientist at India’s Department of Atomic Energy in Mumbai. A worst-case outcome may occur if overheating in the reactor culminates in the rupture of the steel lining protecting radioactive material.

“In the worst scenario, an explosion could occur inside the steel pressure vessel, fuel bundles melt down and the radioactivity is exposed,” Malhotra said in a phone interview. “I would say there is a 10 percent probability still.”

Read more here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-15/-worst-case-nuclear-disaster-in-japan-hangs-on-string-of-unlikely-events.html

Dangers for Human Health From Radiation Poisoning: Questions and Answers
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/understanding-risk-of-radiation-poisoning-in-japan-questions-and-answers.html

Japan impact rattles investors

Adele Ferguson LONDON

March 14, 2011

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THE biggest earthquake in Japan's history left the global equities and insurance markets reeling as experts spent the weekend grappling with the financial impact on the world's third-biggest economy and the knock-on effects to the global recovery.

Global markets wobbled, oil prices closed lower, the futures market for grain commodities dived and shares in global insurance and reinsurance stocks fell as analysts began to tally up the losses caused by the earthquake, the tsunami and the implications of a nuclear meltdown in the wake of cooling system damage.

Initial estimates of the damage to the Japanese economy are about $100 billion, with the global insurance industry believed to be exposed to less than $15 billion.

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The Japanese government will bear most of the costs as it reinsures most homeowner earthquake insurance policies in a giant pool fund.

Share prices in Japan are expected to fall further when trading resumes today, while in Australia the futures market suggests a gain on opening. But given news over the weekend about the state of nuclear fallout, the loss of life and the disruption to economic activity, investors will be grappling with the impact for some time.

In the short term, economists believe the impact on the Japanese economy will be negative, in part due to physical damage to infrastructure and capital stock and because of the psychological trauma suffered by the Japanese, which is likely to trigger risk aversion, a drop in consumer confidence and an increased urge to save.

This could prove a negative for Australia as Japan is its second biggest export market, accounting for more than $37 billion of exports last year.

Investors expect Japan will be forced to increase its already bloated borrowing in a weak economic environment to finance the massive rebuilding project.

The damage has also triggered a debate about whether the earthquake will be a market-changing event for the insurance sector. Since the start of the year natural disasters, including floods and a cyclone in Australia and an earthquake in New Zealand, have wreaked havoc on the insurance and reinsurance industries, leaving the sector exposed to more than $50 billion in damages.

With so many catastrophes, the expectation is that prices will be pushed higher in the July 1 reinsurance renewals. If prices rise, general insurers will be forced to pass them on in higher premiums.

The insurance industry has been suffering from a so-called soft market. That happens when their prices come under pressure as insurers and reinsurers have lots of spare capital and compete more for business.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/japan-impact-rattles-investors-20110313-1bsx4.htm
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Japanese Debt to GDP

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

Japan is unloved, under-owned and most importantly undervalued

Five of the top 10 performers out of 1,965 unit trusts this year so far are Japan funds, but the sector is shunned by investors.

 

By Ian Cowie
Published: 10:18PM GMT 11 Mar 2010

Now here's a funny thing. Five of the top 10 performers out of 1,965 unit trusts this year so far are Japan funds, but the sector is shunned by investors. While individual savings accounts (Isas) as a whole enjoyed their biggest-ever inflow last month, investors took £503,000 more out of Japan Isas than they paid in.

Not that this mismatch between very short-term returns and popularity should come as any surprise. As the graph on this page demonstrates, the Nikkei 225 index has been stuck in a 20-year sulk while the FTSE 100 has powered ahead. 

But that has not prevented some fund managers making handsome profits in Japan, due to shrewd stock-picking and the way the yen has strengthened against the pound. Now some contrarians claim the currency is set to unravel and this will be the long-awaited key to rekindle the profitability of Japan's exporters.

This is a counter-intuitive and complex strategy based on Japan's new government, soaring debt (much worse as a percentage of gross domestic product than that of Britain or Greece), its ageing population and collapsing savings ratio. 

After so many false dawns over the past two decades, could things really be looking up in the land of the rising sun? Could the world's second-biggest economy see share prices rise from their current level, three quarters lower than their peak in 1990? 

All things considered, this was an interesting time to go and see for myself. My host in Tokyo, Chris Taylor, fund manager of Neptune Japan Opportunities, a UK-based open-ended investment company, has taken big bets here and won before. In 2008 he shorted the country's banks before they hit the buffers and delivered returns of more than 80pc to sterling investors, during a year in which the Nikkei fell by 40pc.

But swimming against the tide is not easy and hedging the yen backfired last year when this fund could only edge forward by 7pc. Even so, Mr Taylor remains the top performer in Japan over three and five years. He is not alone in favouring this country as the next opportunity to demonstrate that the best way to make big profits is to buy before the herd arrive.

Gartmore recently launched a Japan Absolute Return fund and GLG, PSigma, Skandia and Threadneedle are all increasing their exposure to Japan.

Tom Becket, chief investment officer at PSigma, said: "Investors have chosen to ignore Japan's geographic location on the dragon's doorstep, which allows huge opportunities for Japanese companies to benefit from Asian growth.

"One of the key investment lessons of the past few years is that you make the serious cash by betting against the rest. Japan is unloved, unfashionable, under-researched, under-owned and – most importantly – undervalued." 

Similarly, Ian Burden, head of the Japan desk at Threadneedle, claims: "Although a weaker yen would reduce returns for an unhedged overseas investor, it would provide further earnings leverage to our expectations for the export sector, while moving the domestic economy towards recovery."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/comment/iancowie/7424374/Japan-is-unloved-under-owned-and-most-importantly-undervalued.html

When Consumers Cut Back: An Object Lesson From Japan

When Consumers Cut Back: An Object Lesson From Japan

By HIROKO TABUCHI

Published: February 21, 2009

TOKYO — As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

Multimedia
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In Japan, Neither Spending Nor Saving

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.
Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.
The Takigasaki family in the Tokyo suburb of Nakano goes further to save a yen or two. Although the family has a comfortable nest egg, Hiroko Takigasaki carefully rations her vegetables. When she goes through too many in a given week, she reverts to her cost-saving standby: cabbage stew.
“You can make almost anything with some cabbage, and perhaps some potato,” says Mrs. Takigasaki, 49, who works part time at a home for people with disabilities.
Her husband has a well-paying job with the electronics giant Fujitsu, but “I don’t know when the ax will drop,” she says. “Really, we need to save much, much more.”
Japan eventually pulled itself out of the Lost Decade of the 1990s, thanks in part to a boom in exports to the United States and China. But even as the economy expanded, shell-shocked consumers refused to spend. Between 2001 and 2007, per-capita consumer spending rose only 0.2 percent.
Now, as exports dry up amid a worldwide collapse in demand, Japan’s economy is in free-fall because it cannot rely on domestic consumption to pick up the slack.
In the last three months of 2008, Japan’s economy shrank at an annualized rate of 12.7 percent, the sharpest decline since the oil shocks of the 1970s.
“Japan is so dependent on exports that when overseas markets slow down, Japan’s economy teeters on collapse,” said Hideo Kumano, an economist at the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute. “On the surface, Japan looked like it had recovered from its Lost Decade of the 1990s. But Japan in fact entered a second Lost Decade — that of lost consumption.”
The Japanese have had some good reasons to scale back spending.
Perhaps most important, the average worker’s paycheck has shrunk in recent years, even after companies rebounded and bolstered their profits.
That discrepancy is the result of aggressive cost-cutting on the part of Japanese exporters like Toyota and Sony. They, like American companies now, have sought to fend off cutthroat competition from companies in emerging economies like South Korea and Taiwan, where labor costs are low.
To better compete, companies slashed jobs and wages, replacing much of their work force with temporary workers who had no job security and fewer benefits. Nontraditional workers now make up more than a third of Japan’s labor force.
Younger people are feeling the brunt of that shift. Some 48 percent of workers age 24 or younger are temps. These workers, who came of age during a tough job market, tend to shun conspicuous consumption.
They tend to be uninterested in cars; a survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.
Young Japanese women even seem to be losing their once- insatiable thirst for foreign fashion. Louis Vuitton, for example, reported a 10 percent drop in its sales in Japan in 2008.
“I’m not interested in big spending,” says Risa Masaki, 20, a college student in Tokyo and a neighbor of the Takigasakis. “I just want a humble life.”
Japan’s aging population is not helping consumption. Businesses had hoped that baby boomers — the generation that reaped the benefits of Japan’s postwar breakneck economic growth — would splurge their lifetime savings upon retirement, which began en masse in 2007. But that has not happened at the scale that companies had hoped.
Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.
“My husband is retiring in five years, and I’m very concerned,” says Ms. Masaki’s mother, Naoko, 52. She says it is no relief that her husband, a public servant, can expect a hefty retirement package; pension payments could fall, and she has two unmarried children to worry about.
“I want him to find another job, and work as long as he’s able,” Mrs. Masaki says. “We must be ready to fend for ourselves.”
Economic stimulus programs like the one President Obama signed into law last week have been hampered in Japan by deflation, the downward spiral of prices and wages that occurs when consumers hold down spending — in part because they expect goods to be cheaper in the future.
Economists say deflation could interfere with the two trillion yen ($21 billion) in cash handouts that the Japanese government is planning, because consumers might save the extra money on the hunch that it will be more valuable in the future than it is now.
The same fear grips many economists and policymakers in the United States. “Deflation is a real risk facing the economy,” President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, told reporters this month.
Hiromi Kobayashi, 38, a Tokyo homemaker, has taken to sewing children’s ballet clothes at home to supplement income from her husband’s job at a movie distribution company. The family has not gone on vacation in two years and still watches a cathode-ray tube TV. Mrs. Kobayashi has her eye on a flat-panel TV but is holding off.
“I’m going to find a bargain, then wait until it gets even cheaper,” she says.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/worldbusiness/22japan.html?em

Understanding ROE: a handy performance yardstick

Japan: Where Capital Goes to Die
By Toby Shute January 14, 2009 Comments (3)

Ah, Japan: land of the rising sun, homeland of the hot dog-eating champions, and capital-sucking vortex.

"Capital-sucking vortex?" That's a wee bit harsh, no?

No, it's really not Japan is where capital goes to die, and I have the stats to prove it.

Firing up my super-duper stock screener (not sold in stores), I see 2,371 companies with a primary listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. That excludes non-Japanese firms that happen to have local listings, like Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW) and Aflac (NYSE: AFL). Out of all those businesses, how many do you think managed a greater-than -4% return on equity -- a solid but not stunning result -- over each of the years 2005, 2006, and 2007?

Make sure you don't guess too high, or you'll be disqualified. I'll give you a hint: The answer is less than 800.

The price is wrong! In fact, only 35 firms hit that mark! Add in the 925 companies on the Jasdaq exchange, plus the stragglers listed on other local exchanges, and the number climbs to ... 36. In total, fewer than 1% of Japanese equities pass this simple test of Capital Allocation 101.

Why does return on equity (ROE) matter to Foolish investors?

Here's a primer, but the simple fact is that the "E" in ROE is shareholders' money. If management is retaining earnings to reinvest in the business, one of its basic requirements is to continuously generate an attractive return on the owners' investment. There are plenty of "profitable" companies in Japan, but those wealth-withering single-digit returns on equity just don't cut the wasabi.

Return on equity isn't the end-all and be-all of performance yardsticks, but it's a very handy one, especially if you remember that managers can juice this figure by taking on more debt. Note that I didn't limit my Japanese search to a maximum level of indebtedness. Some of the companies that passed the test only did so by leveraging to the hilt.
Do we avoid the archipelago entirely? After running this sobering screen, I'll definitely refrain from throwing investment dollars at something like the iShares MSCI Japan Index (NYSE: EWJ), no matter how cheap the broad market looks.

However, I'm not going to rule out every single Japanese company. After all, I've got three dozen here that are at least worth a look.

Take Komatsu, for example. This equipment heavyweight is the Japanese version of Deere (NYSE: DE). After checking out the numbers, I'm tempted to say that Komatsu is the superior firm.

These two outfits throw off about the same level of revenue, but Komatsu sports slightly fatter margins. In trying to suss out the difference, one statistic really jumped out at me. On its website, Komatsu lists 39,267 employees on a consolidated basis, whereas Deere recently claimed 56,700 full-timers. The resulting revenue-per-employee figure suggests that Komatsu's operations are a good deal more efficient.

I would also note that Komatsu has managed to post good returns on equity without employing nearly as much balance-sheet leverage as Deere.

Another interesting group of firms are the so-called sogo shosha, or general trading companies. Mitsubishi, Mitsui (Nasdaq: MITSY), Itochu, and Marubeni all passed my simple return-on-equity screen.

What do these firms trade, exactly? Well, pretty much everything, from textiles to food products to petroleum. Some of these companies date back centuries; they seem like a natural outgrowth of the nation's limited resource endowment.

I've run across several of these firms in my energy-sector coverage, from Mitsui's profitable Petrobras (NYSE: PBR) partnership to Itochu's dinged deepwater venture. They're interesting businesses, but I find them nearly impossible to analyze. If you're a fan of conglomerates like General Electric (NYSE: GE), then the Japanese trading houses may be right up your alley.

A Foolish final word I'm still parsing this list of Japanese firms, but here's a preliminary observation. Of the 36 firms, only six have a market capitalization north of $10 billion. In other words, the big boys are blowing it. That should make you even more wary of taking an index-based approach to your Japan exposure, unless you pick up one of the small-cap ETFs.

In Japan, just as we've discovered here at home, the market's best stocks are ignored, obscure, and small.


Fool contributor Toby Shute doesn't have a position in any company mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy, and possesses a strong affinity for robots.

http://www.fool.com/investing/international/2009/01/14/japan-where-capital-goes-to-die.aspx

Japan Offers a Possible Road Map for U.S. Economy

Japan Offers a Possible Road Map for U.S. Economy

By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: December 19, 2008

TOKYO — When the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate to virtually zero earlier this week, what was a historic move in Washington seemed old hat here in Tokyo.
The Bank of Japan kept rates near zero for most of the last decade in an effort to end a long economic stagnation, and raised them only two years ago. Many economists say they believe that the zero interest-rate policy finally worked in Japan after regulators took aggressive steps that succeeded in restoring faith in Japan’s financial system and Tokyo’s ability to oversee it.
Now, with the Fed and President-elect Barack Obama turning to the same sorts of unconventional policy tools to battle the worst global economic crisis since the Depression, economists and bankers say they hope that Japan’s lessons are not lost on Washington. They say the United States needs to take the same kinds of confidence-building steps, and much more quickly than Japan did.
“Japan had years of trial and error to gets its response right, but the United States doesn’t have that kind of time because markets are changing so fast,” said Akio Makabe, an economics professor at Shinshu University. “The Fed has to move, and has to move fast, to restore confidence.”
On Friday, the Bank of Japan cut its benchmark rate to 0.1 percent, from 0.3 percent, saying in a statement that it was following the Fed’s “dramatic rate cut” to lower borrowing costs and jolt global demand. On Tuesday, the Fed lowered short-term rates to a range of zero to 0.25 percent, and vowed to pump money directly into the credit markets by buying mortgage-related debt and corporate bonds.
The Bank of Japan also announced that it would try to shore up Japan’s credit markets by buying commercial paper, a type of short-term corporate debt. Central banks in Europe have also reduced rates amid concerns the global economy could contract next year for the first time in decades.
Tuesday’s rate cut by the Fed also made short-term borrowing costs lower in the United States than in Japan for the first time in 15 years. This helped drive up the yen to 13-year highs, as investors tend to favor currencies that offer higher rates of return. The Bank of Japan said its rate cut on Friday was partly aimed at capping the yen’s gains.
The Bank of Japan first lowered interest rates to zero in 1999 for a year and then again in 2001 for five years. The Japanese central bank was trying to contain a domestic financial crisis not unlike the one now crippling global markets, in which collapsing real estate and share prices caused the bankruptcy of large financial companies, like Yamaichi Securities in 1997.
The central bank’s hope was that by lowering borrowing costs to virtually nil, it could encourage commercial banks to lend more money to businesses and consumers, rekindling demand.
Economists and former Bank of Japan officials say the biggest lesson they learned was that cutting rates alone has almost no effect when the financial system has fallen into a crisis as deep as the one Japan faced in the 1990s.
Japanese banks simply refused to lend in an environment where borrowers could suddenly go bankrupt, saddling lenders with huge, unforeseen losses. The Bank of Japan tried even more extreme measures, like using its powers to create money to essentially stuff cash into the nation’s commercial banks in hopes they would start lending again.
Exasperated central bankers found that commercial banks just let the money pile up instead of lending it out.
Economists say the United States faces a similar situation, after the sudden collapse in September of Lehman Brothers created fears of additional failures. Economists also fault Washington for its inconsistency in dealing with the financial crisis, leaving the impression that it does not have a clear strategy for dealing with ailing lenders.
In Japan’s case, economists and former bankers say, credit began to flow freely again only after 2003, when regulators adopted a tough new policy of auditing banks and forcing weaker ones to raise new capital or accept a government takeover. Economists said the audits finally removed paralysis in credit markets by convincing bankers and investors that sudden failures were no longer a risk, and that the true extent of problems at banks and other companies was finally being revealed.
Economists say Washington needs to do something similar to make banks and financial companies more transparent, and reassure investors that there were no more collapses like that of Lehman Brothers on the horizon.
“The United States needs to do it like Takenaka did,” said Anil Kashyap, a professor of business at the University of Chicago, referring to Heizo Takenaka, the former banking minister who started the 2003 audits. “We need someone to come in and give a good housekeeping seal to banks.”
Economists and former central bankers said another lesson from Japan’s experience was the importance of consistency. This became apparent in 2000, they said, during one of the bank’s more embarrassing episodes, when it raised interest rates, and lowered them back to zero a year later when the economy faltered.
Former Bank of Japan officials said they learned that bankers and investors would lend in difficult times only if they believed that rates would stay low for a long period, ensuring them adequate profits. By raising the possibility of future interest rate increases, the Bank of Japan dampened enthusiasm for lending, say bankers and economists.
“We learned that zero rates work by building expectations,” said Rei Masunaga, an economist and former director general at the Bank of Japan. “Zero interest rates take time to be effective.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/business/worldbusiness/20yen.html?em

Economic Impact of Interest Rates and the Japanese Economy

Economic Impact of Interest Rates
There is a tendency to forget that for every borrower there is a lender and that interest rates work both ways. Less interest paid by borrowers means less interest received by lenders. When interest rates rise or fall, total disposable income doesn’t change; it simply redistributes.

Effect of rising interest rates on consumers
1. Consumer demand declines because the forced reduction in consumption by the greater number of borrowers is greater than the increased consumption of the lesser number of lenders.
2. Reduced demand is said to dampen inflationary impact of rising prices.
3. Budget-strapped families are forced to work extra hours or family member to seek part-time work.
4. The subsequent increase in availability of labour reduces pressure on wage demands.


Effect of interest rates rise on highly leveraged businesses
1. Profitability of highly leveraged businesses is reduced by their high cost of debt. Main impact on profitability is felt by exporters.
2. More foreign capital inflows are attracted by the higher interest rates which increases the exchange rate, consequently reducing the value of exports in the domestic currency.
3. Lower export output means reduced demand for labour and consequent further restraint on wage increases.
4. Higher exchange rate also means that the lower cost of imports will reduce prices
5. Reduced labour demand in industries competing with imported goods stabilizes costs by again increasing the availability of labour.


Effect of falling interest rates
1. Debtors are rewarded and more inclined to be financially irresponsible.
2. Those who have been prudent in accumulating savings in interest-bearing securities are penalized and less inclined to be prudent in the future. (Given the impact of a 40 percent tax rate and 3 percent inflation on an interest rate of 5 percent, the zero return (5 percent x 60 percent – 3 percent) provides zero incentive for prudence.)
3. Although serving short-term political objectives and rescuing overleveraged debtors, the longer-term effects of artificially low interest rates have proven to be undesirable.

Low Interest rates and The Japanese Economy
Any doubt about the effectiveness of low interest rates to stimulate the real economy should have been dispelled by the well-publicised Japanese experience. In spite of having interest rates close to zero and the government running a huge annual deficit, thus leaving more disposable income in the hands of the consumers, Japan has suffered a lingering recession since 1990.


The Nikkei 225 index’s loss of one-third of its value in the past 20 years can only be attributed to the low profitability of Japan’s corporations. Even with the leverage of close to zero interest rates, the ROE of Japan’s large nonfinancial firms fell from 8.2 percent in 1988 to an average of 3.1 percent between 1992 and 1999. It has since recovered to roughly 10 percent in 2007, but still lags a long way behind higher-interest-rate countries.


The real determinant of economic viability, ROFE (Returns on Funds Employed), would obviously be considerably lower than the quoted ROEs. When debt servicing is of no concern, inefficiencies creep into the business and the economic viability of capex becomes less important.
The prices of those wonderful products we buy from Japan are subsidized by shareholders of Japanese corporations. Little wonder that Buffett, when asked about investing in Japan in 2007, wryly commented that the profitability of Japanese companies was too low for Berkshire’s liking.


Although Japanese corporate profitability is improving, by Western standards most of its major corporations have not been economically viable in the past, and if required to pay equitable rates of interest, would be in serious financial difficulty.


The high Nikkei index PE ratio in 2007 of 18 (price-to-book value of 1.9) on average ROEs of 10 percent is influenced by the meager average dividend yield of 1.1 percent still being better than leaving money in the bank.


With so little incentive to invest and debt so cheap, it is not surprising that in 2005 Japan was the world’s largest consumer of luxury goods, accounting for 41 percent. Rather than working in favour of Japanese investors, low interest rates over the past 20 years have decimated their funds. Although low domestic rates persist, demand for Japanese stocks will remain high and they will therefore continue to be grossly overpriced.

The reason Japan keeps rates so low is to encourage an outflow of capital to dampen the yen exchange rate to help its exporters. In other words, domestic employment is the prime motivation. If Japan’s trade surplus were repatriated, rather than being left abroad, the US dollar would crumble and the yen appreciate to a level that would make life even tougher, perhaps impossible, for many Japanese exporters.

Here is a simple question to see whether you have been following the argument.
Given a Nikkei index figure of 16,500 and the abovementioned ROE (10 percent) and price to book value (1.9), what would the Nikkei index need to be to achieve a 10 percent return from an index fund that replicated it? Answer: 8684

When ROE and RR (Rate of Return) are equal, value is equal to book value. Therefore, 16,500 / 1.9 (price to book value) = 8684.

These are the sorts of things to consider when thinking about investing in international funds.


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