The question was, how did Noda know this?
For some reason just then I glanced over toward Akira Mori. She appeared to be studying a scroll with the detachment of a Zen monk in zazen meditation, but she wasn't missing a syllable.
"Care to run through whatever it is you have in mind?" I indicated one of the ottomans along the side of the room, now clearing as bidders rose to go inside. I watched as the dark- suited Japanese businessmen filed past, none with Noda's sense of style, and noticed that several seemed acquainted with him, pausing to offer obsequious bows.
"With pleasure." He settled himself. Mori, now looking over some screens, still didn't elect to join us. "First, may I presume you already know something of Nippon, Inc.?"
"No more than what I gleaned from that package you forwarded. Almost nothing, really."
He laughed, a flash of even teeth. "Perhaps I should be pleased. These days too much visibility in the U.S. can sometimes stir up 'friction’."
"Your prospectus indicated you help banks manage capital, so I assume you're looking to enter the financial picture here."
That was the funny part, recall? There was no indication of any U.S. action in his prospectus. Yet I knew that, overall, Japan's U.S. investment, private and public, was in the tens and hundreds of billions. Pension funds and industries were building factories, financing corporations, snapping up Treasury paper. Japan had become a major source of fresh money for the U.S. and for the world. But Nippon, Inc. wasn't one of the players.
"Yes, we intend to be concerned, initially, with the position of Japanese capital in the U.S. We are particularly interested in the matter of Treasury debentures."
That was what anybody would have figured. Just that week the Journal had noted that Japanese investors were expected to cover half of our Treasury overdrafts for the year. They were advancing us the bucks to keep up that spending spree known as the national deficit. They sold us Toyotas; we sold them federal IOUs, using the proceeds to buy more Toyotas. In effect they were financing the good life, supplying us the "revolving credit" to buy their cars and DVDs and semiconductors.