What is a better world?

Everyone seeks a better world. What is it, then?

Taro Aso, the prime minister of Japan, stated in his speech in davos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8vxkTozAdE&feature=related

First, it is a world in which each and every individual can develop his or her potential through his or her own efforts.

Second, it is a world that values diversity, including diversity of races, of ethnicities, and of religions.

Third, it is a world with a resurgence of economic rationality with a balance between competition and regulation.

I can totally agree with this idea. Not only that these could be universally important in this modern world, but also these three conditions can be connected to the present challenges that global society is facing at.

However, one thing I want to say is: why he, actually the bureaucrats that support him, doesn't speak out the ideal picture of the society when he makes a speech in Japan? Maybe he does, but it is not so highlighted and each policy seems not to be connected to that picture. I dislike the ambiguous way of politics.

In terms of the goal showned by a leader of Japan, I appreciate the slogan "toward a beautiful nation" introduced by Shinzo Abe, the ex-prime minister of Japan. This kind of key word makes people aware of the politics more, which means an impressive key word can lead people.

Before restoring the consumer confidence, the governors may restore the people's confidence as a Japanese.

Needles to say, if the slogan contains some forms of global awareness, that's highly better.

The essences to become someone

From what I've felt today having a conversation with good friends, I thought the following essences are important to become someone.

-Have a global perspective. Don't confine your focus within narrow, trivial things.

-Be proud of what you've achived. The accumulation of steps that you've taken brings you another, oftenly exciting step.

Broad focuses foreseeing the future, and daily activities. That makes you an interesting person.

Greed is...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq_9xr4rrZ0&feature=related

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed cuts through and captures the essence of evolutionary spirit."

This is a scene from the film "Wall Street", a story of a young stockbroker named Bud, once succeeded with the backing of a powerful and greedy gentleman named Gekko.
Gekko had a speech as the biggest share holder in front of the company managements, and showed his philosophy of greed.

This represents one extreme side of capitalism. Greed shapes the world better, as the great economist Adam Smith had said in his famous work "The wealth of nations". However, in this film, Bud was finally arrested for his violating federal securities laws. And, though it stayed ambiguous in the film, Gekko could be arrested for Bud's cooperation with the federal authorities. I don't know. Gekko also could escape from being arrested. His greediness would urge him to take every conceivable means. The conclusion depends on your imagination.

I hope he will be arrested if it were a real story. The economy system should be kept healthy. Greed could be good, as Gekko said. You can rack your brains to invent some revolutionary way to earn, and the way you invented could maximize the utility of individuals. That's a contribution to the society. That's what the system should be.

What now people need would be a more realistic way of "greed management" that assures healthy and sustainable development.

global financial system

Global financial system seems to be transformed... and I believe that's needed.

Looking back one or two decades, there were too many financial crisis happend, which means the system have not been well designed yet. We still don't know what's the best financial model, considering too many factors such as international politics, religious conflictions, and an appropriate balance between efficiency and equality.

There can be seen tons of critisizing IBs, some of which are emotional and incoherent. I interpret that those include a kind of scapegoating. It is too much easy to blame those who earned so much. But who bought the products of IBs, urged by their own greed? Who was responsible to regulate economic activities?

However, in my opinion, two ingredients in the present financial system are needed to corrected:
One is the possibility of controlling the stock price spectacularly by dominating a company's share.
The other is the fragile way of risk hedging showned as CDO, CDS, and so on.

On top of that, some experts insist the importance of "morality" and "long term view".
Those could also be the key words for the new system, though I cannot see any concret way to include those elements into the market rules.

The aftereffect of the Era of Excess will confuses us for a long time.

Be openminded and tell others what are you interested in

That's all.

I believe you don't have to keep what you want to do in secret from others.

The more you tell others, the more people around you understand you.

The more you show your interest to them, the more likely they give you a help that you need.

one thing that you can't forget is: be honest, go straightforward looking at your goal, but don't expect other's help too much, and be mindful of helping others instead.

from the Era of Excess: next 5 to 10years

Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley in Asia, described last several years or so as "Era of Excess".

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=62bRjaEDjM4

The world financial system will be transferred rapidly.
We should construct a new financial governance which assures the sustainable growth.
Deeper appriciation of long term view is needed.

However, at the same time, it is important to utilise what we invented in these Era of excess: financial engineering technologies such as derivatives.

Everyone says risk management takes crucially important place, and because of derivatives this world crisis has happened: is this true?
We can remember that derivatives used to be a means to hedge the risk, not to just earn a profit. Everyone wanted to hedge the risk by buying lotsof derivatives. Now, they suddenly noticed that what they believed as the insurance to escape the loss actually doesn't work.

If that so, I believe the technology of derivatives whould be improved more and more, instead of avoiding those.

Of course, now, market is quite bear due to the serious credid crunch. Real economy is getting the unbelievable damage too. So many famous companies such as Toyota, Sony, NEC and so on are now cutting off their employees. This is too amazing.

In coming 3 years, the economy will continue to get downward.


But after that..?



There should be some safer area, where many people gain "abundance", or.. maybe even right now... some places in the world are quite far from this crisis and very easy to start and raise businesses..


To get involved such a positive trend is greatly important.
Coming 5 to 10 years would be a key for my whole life.

Grasp the trend. Be opportunistic.

And, be hungry for fostering your own public mind.

Newspaper test

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=w3zBfBs-hBc&feature=related

Buffet replied a question from a Harvard student: how do you instill the co-ledership throught out your organization? And to begin with, how do you know that the management one level below you as making decisions so parallel with your own?

This concerns with the management philosophy of Buffet, and the answer was interesting.

Well, all the money we need, you know, we like to have more. But we can afford lose money, but we can't afford lose reputation. Therefore I ask the managers to judge every actions they take not just by legal standars, well that's for the first test, but also by the test what I called newspaper test:

how would they feel about any given action if they knew written up, say next day, in a local newspaper, to be read by their family, by their neighbours, by their friends, written by a smart and unfriendly reporter?
If passes that test, it is OK. But I tell them if anything is close to the line, it's out.

We can afford lose money, but we can't afford lose reputation.

I guess this represents what the conventional American capitalistic value sometimes ignored.

I'll keep this in my mind.

Reproduction of Poverty in Japan

There are certain number of children who don't go to erementary school or secondary school even though it is the obligation for their parents to have their children go to those schools.
And this have been the big issue in Japan since, I guess, early 1990s just after the bubble bursted.

Now news said a part of the reason of that comes from the poverty of the parents, as they found the percentage of such children among the "needy families" is far more than that of normal families.

News analysed that because they are poor, they cannot take care of their children properly, and children become less motivated to go to school.

If that so, this is exactly the reproduction of poverty.

In general, we regard Japan as the middle class country.
There's less rich people, there's less poor people.
And comparing to the US or China, poor children also have a chance to become rich.

But..the thing is..

Foreign Students in Pekin University

I got a news. not a big news.

but..

80% of the foreign students studying in Pekin University is from KOREA..!

According to my friend who serves as the president of Japanese Student Association in Peking University, there're 1000 students from Korea, and 100 students from Japan, and Japanese group is the second largest grup among foregin students at there.

That's amazing, isn't it? What a huge difference.. the China-Korea relationship seems closer than China-Japan, in terms of exchanging the human resource.
Not only the student exchanging. From what I've heard, a Korean manufacturing company sends huge number of their employees to China in order to let them deeply understand Chinese culture, and, that's because Korean company took over larger share in China, while Japanese companies are comparatively struggling to survive.

Lookign at the University of Tokyo(UT), there appears to be more Chinese students than Korean students. Partly and simply because the population of China is larger than that of Japan or Korea by far.

All things considered, it could be said as follows;

China-Korea Relationship > China-Japan relationship > Korea-Japan relationship

Davos 2009, Heizo participated as a panel

...http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=8SrIQfmJ4A8&feature=channel

This is the video of a morning panel discussion of World Economic Forum 2009, namely the Davos conference.

The panels were; The chief economist of World Bank, Yifu Lin, who is the proffessor of Pekin University.
Though born in Taiwan, he is one of the most popular profs among those in Beijing.
Heizo Takenaka, a famous economists in Japan who served for the prime minister Koizumi as an economy advisor can be seen here, too.
Others, such as the mister of finance of South Africa, the head of Asian area of Morgan Stanley, are starring.

Heizo mentioned "confidence", as the thing crucially needed now, though Mankiw said "confidence" is nothing but vague..
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/01/shiller-on-animal-spirits.html

He also gave us some ideas comparing what Japan experienced in late 90s and what we are now facing. According to him, those cases are quite different because now we're facing the "money market crisis" while the disaster in the late 90s was the "banking crisis". On top of that, he said according to what we've learnt in late 90s was our bank bailing out is just not enough. And also, in order to take a quick action, he insisted to persuade the politicians because usually the politicians are reluctant to use tax payer's money.

Those are quite ordinary opinion, though.

Let me summarize the whole idea of this video, TOMORROW....I'm actually sleepy

The education in Japan

When it comes to the education in Japan, I can point out the lack of the system for highly motivated students to study further.

To begin with, probably because of the Japanese culture that puts much emphasis on being same as the others, Japanese education seems to have been promoting the uniformity at everywhere. In other words, they always take care of those who have some problem in studying and they appear to dislike only some of the students to step into further studying.

However, in order to nurture outstanding leaders in various feilds in Japan, we need to focus on the students who have a high motivation to study a lot, and who will contribute to the society in the future.

Having said that, I suggest to make a system to assist such students to go through the higher education career, such as giving a student a chance to skip the grades or to meet some prestigious people, etc.

By doing that, I think Japanese education can avoid the uniformity and I hope such an education will nurture the outstanding leaders in many fields in Japan.

well, it's time to sleep.

What is the function of the finance?

According to the video of a dialogue between an editor of Financial Times and Josef Stiglitz, who is a novel prize economist, the function of the finance is to manage the risk and allocate assets.

This is quite understandable, and at least the governments of a certain major countries should design their economical/financial system and rules in order to realize that fundamental function by financial institutions.

But now, what happend is risk was created, and assets were misallocated.

Stock prices of most of the companies on the major markets plunged so much, and no one could see the exit of this sever depressing situation.

I don't know to what degree the financial private companies should consider about the reward to the society. In principle, private actors can persue their own profit as long as they don't violate the rules, namely the laws.
Yet, however, there's an argument that a company should take social responsibility into account. That means, even if a company found a very big business chance, they should think twice whether that doesn't harm to the world. Is this right?

In my opinion so far, this is a kind of illogical.

Market should be appropriately designed, first of all.

And, moreover, if a company knows if a business project will do harm to the society, which means a company itself will get a damage in the end, they simply don't take that business plan.
This is a proper feedback system that if you make a bad influence on the society, you'll get the negative effect also.
In this way, a company can avoid harmful business. There's no need to set such a vague regulation to refrain from unsustainable business.

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In conclusion, we have to seek and try another new financial rules that encompass the finance to the right function, which is to manage risk and to allocate assets.

Baird --an emerging investment bank??

Do you know "Baird"?? This is one of the largest privately held, full-service investment firms in the United States, according to Wikipedia.

Suprisingly, under this severe economic situation, this firm recently increased the numbers of employees and branches reportedly.

In fact, it got 14th in the Fortune's ranking of the best companies to work for, and also 18th of the top-paying companies, and we cannot find any other investment bank except goldman sachs having a higher ranking than Baird.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/snapshots/14.html
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0901/gallery.bestcos_toppay.fortune/18.html

Is it emerging?? Does anyone knows this firm??

Unfortunately,according to its website, there's no branch in Japan... which could be a reason why it's not well known in Japan...

Anyway, I'm curious about this company..

Japan Passing

Japan Passing??

Here are some rankings of the companies;

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0901/gallery.bestcos_toppay.fortune/index.html
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/

I found a financial company that increased the numbers of their employees and offices, for they are expanding their business scale. They seem to seceed to earn a profit much.

An era changes, and new companies will rise.

If now is the changing moment from the era that the "Bulge Blackets" emerge and grasp a huge success, it's not so hard to imagine there will be another company that take an initiative to lead a new era.

It seemed to be Google and other web service companies such as Facebook, but now IT industry appears mere an industry, not such a limit-less and miraculous area that people had imagined late 1990s.

Going back to the point, a financial company that I've found as enlarging their business has several Asian branches but not in Tokyo.

This was astonishing. No chance in Tokyo any more? I believe not, coz Tokyo is the place that I have an advantage of Japanese language skill. Among this internationalized environment, still, Tokyo is the world of Japanese.

If there's no chance in Tokyo.. I would have to set off to the international business world that English takes place instead of any other languages.

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I cannot see any advantage comparing to the other applicants in any other country, unless it's required Japanese skill.

Terry, Guan Le, Cathy, Rajib,,, I could imagine several names of my friends who work in the financial industry. Am I competitive? How could I become competitive?

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In order not to be passed even if Japan was passed, I have to acquire three skills;

1) English

It wouldn't enough for me to be able to just convey your rough idea and negotiate with native speakers. What we have to do in our business is to fully convince others, to tacticly win the negociation, or to deeply touch others heart.

Not only a fluency, but also a sophisticated literacy.

2) Finance Knowledge/experience

This is the exact skill that you need, while English is a skill to support this proffessional knowledge.
Having not studied finance nor economy in a university, I would have to acquire this by on the job training.

Actually, the financial industry contains broad range of fields.

Besides a traditional security underwriting, the investment banks developed the trading business and the principal investment during 1980s and 1990 respectively.
Through these periods, "derivatives" was also a tornado of finance.

Now, the means of investment are varied so much.

Two of the main developed fields are Private Equity (i.e. PE) and distressed opportunity.
It would be important to have an experience of these area.

3) Communication/Networking

This is the very basic skill as a human living in a society.
And this comunication skill leads us to develop a "network" in the business world.
To get a position, to creat a company, to find an opportunity, etc.

Be open-minded, be honest, be thankful and be unique.

Don't hesitate to conttact the one you want to meet.

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With regard to the Japan Passing, we had better to prepare go outside of Japan at anymoment in search of opportunity.

anyway

I love to write English, I love to listen to English.

I now became a crazy for English. That's absolutly good for my English studying.

trying to be Obama

These days I try to remember Obama's speech.

The story was quite simple; There's a book now very well sold. It costs only 1000 yen, including a CD, and contains Obama's major speech's script and Japanese translation.

Let me try to write down a part of what I've remembered.

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On behalf of the grate state of Illinoi, crossroad of the nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deepest gratitude for the priviledge of adressing the convention.
To night is a particular honor for me, because, let's face it, my presense on this stage is pretty unlikely.

My father was a foreign student. Born and raised in a small villege of Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father--my grand father-- was a cook, a domestic servant of the British. But my grand father had a larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and preserverence, my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to somany who had come before.

While studying, my father met my mother. She was born in a town of the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worled for oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after the Parl Harbor, he sined up for duty. Joined Patten's army, marched across Europe. Back home, my grand mother raised a baby and went to work for a bomber assembly line.

...I go to bed

have a dream!

have a dream, and you'll succeed.

Write in English

Latest entries are so childish and quite less insightful.

but.. I want to write entries as if my foreign friends read them everyday.
This means, I want to write what I want to tell to my friends.

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To write in English is still difficult for me.
I found myself that I still think in Japanese first and translate into Engtlish each time, each sentences.

How can I think in English??

That's even harder than to speak in English by thinking in English.

Because, when I write something in English, I cannot help trying to write something very complicated or difficult.
Then it naturally comes that I have to think in Japanese.

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anyway, I go to bed.

Sleep and Work

I often stay up so late.

I am frequently awake at 5 a.m. when my father wakes up everyday.
He used to be surprised by my being awake, but recently he seems get no suprising anymore..

I know staying up so late does harm to my health.

I know being asleep between 23h-02h is very important.

but..

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I dislike to spend a day being sleepy.

That makes everything bothering.

am.. today I'm gonna have an English lesson for 6 hours and after that I have to organize one drinking party (as usual).

am... I should go to bed RIGHT NOW.

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I know, I know, but...

by the way

what shall I do, if the company should go bankrupt?

First, if another company buy the company, that company could hire me.
Is this good choice? I don't know. 70 out of 100 newgrads will take this offer, and the other 30 will not. Their choices will be divercified.
hmm,, if you are suddenly called to go into a room and suddenly heard "you should choose a way; stay in a new company or go out",,, I would be really at a loss...

But in this case, at least I could be hired in the company.

Second, to transfer to a venture company.
Even in Japan, where there's less liquidity of human resorces, human resources for venture company must be pretty flexible. If I found any compamny that's interesting for me, I would participate that...

but... no certainty nor relief by joining a venture company.

Last, there's always a choice to pursue my academic career; to apply to PhD course.
MBA? ..hmm, I don't know again.. or cultural policy in France, but this field is about to end because of Sarcozy's anti-culture attitude. On top of that, given this sever economic situation, there will be nobdody who pays for cultural sector.

This could lead me a really chaotic life plan, since I have no interest to continue my academic career.

In conclusion, I can see no good on the bunkruptcy of my company.

I really hope everything would go as fine as possible, though ofcourse there's always some ways to enjoy my life at best.

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Have a hope, and you'll realize your hope.

shape the world

oh I forgot to write why I write blog in English..

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Even if you think a lot, what you think is normally intangible and you cannot express properly what you've thought.

However, once you wrote down your idea on a paper, you could make your idea orderly clear.

It is as if you brush up your idea, and that idea becomes a part of the world of your thought.

In short, to express your idea in sentences is alike to "shape the world".

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I wanna describe what I thought, firstly by writing, and nextly by speaking.

Shape the world.

English

Probably no one sees this blog...

that's no problem. I'd like to express what I want to express.
This could be a monologue, in order to shape my thinking more sharply, clearly, and profoundly.

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These days I really wonder how can I improve my English skill, or whether it is possible for me to do so...

I have never studied English. Actually I have, for the entrance exam of UT, but... what I did is the training to "imagine" what the texts are saying.
Because almost all the questions at there can be answered by Japanese, (e.g.summarize the paragraph or like that), in fact what you need to pass the exam is your Japanese skill. If you can "produce" sophisticated Japanese phrases, that's all.

I want to improve my English skill, to communicate with English speakers without any noize and to become confident to acquire a foreign language.

confident.. yea, I think I would never be able to master a new language if I couldn't make a improvement in English right now.

I have a time now, and I am motivated to study it. I've always been eager to become a foreign languages speaker. and still I'm not. To master English has been a kinda dream for me and also a passing point to learn various languages.

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I am lucky.

I have quite a few immediate opportunity to speak English.

To improve my English will support my immediate career, perhaps 3 or 4 years later.

I have a plenty of friends who speak English as well as a native speaker.

Any other opportunity in Japan would be as desirable as the environment now.
I must make an effort, since this could be the first, and also the last, chance in coming 5 years.

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Anyway, I have to do my homework right now... and the class will start from 12:15 TODAY.

just.. just I wanna write something at here. And this blog will be regularly continued.