Sunday, February 01, 2009

Ahead of the game (for once)

Although perhaps we didn't quite choose the right destination, at least according to this "investment guru" who thinks we should have gone to China.

Not that he's at all biased, having just taken large bets against the pound. Anyway, although we have taken the emigration route, we are betting against him in the longer term and taking advantage of the extraordinary exchange rate to shift a lot of our spare ¥ back to £ (it's not like there is any sensible place to invest our spare cash here, and there are only so many Apple products to buy). It is amusing to convert our earnings and realise that we will quite possibly never earn even half as much as our current salaries if and when we return to the UK. In it for the gold? We couldn't possibly comment :-)

I also can't help but be bemused by all the media references to the Japanese economic disaster that we have apparently lived through over most of the last decade. It's been a very comfortable existence here, and although I realise we may have been somewhat insulated from the hardships of the less fortunate, the town centres have nowhere near as many abandoned premises and closing down sales as we saw on our recent visit to the UK. The prospects aren't great with exports falling off a cliff, but that is hardly Japan's doing.

1 comment:

EliRabett said...

You might want to read James Fallows, an interesting correspondent for the Atlantic who has moved to Beijing after stints in Japan and Kuala Lampur