What's this all about?
I stopped before one screen and studied it a second. Beneath it a small sign said simply "Electronics." The one next to it read "Biotechnology." Then I glanced at a couple of others. Each one covered a different industrial sector. Gee, I thought, you're really out of touch, Walton. Who would have guessed Japan has so much investment in manufacturing here. I didn't remember much going on besides a few joint ventures. Sure, they've got a few auto assembly plants, that steel plant they'd bought out on the coast, some TV-tube production, chips, VCRs. But mostly it represented entries into sectors where they're trying to get the jump on protectionism, start a token manufacturing operation here before they get shut out.
"If you have any questions, I'm sure we can discuss them later." Tanaka had taken my arm and was urging me politely toward his office. The whines and hums of laser printers and the beep of computers made conversation all but impossible.
"Well, I was merely interested . . ." Then I stopped.
Know that test psychologists have, the one where you look at a couple of silhouettes and describe what you see? If you think you're supposed to look at the white part in the middle, then you see one thing—I think it's a vase. But if you concentrate on the black instead, you see something else entirely, maybe the profiles of two human faces opposite each other. Thus what you see is largely a product of your prior assumptions concerning what you're supposed to be looking for. Or maybe it measures whether you view the world as a positive or a negative image, something like that. I don't recall exactly. I do remember receiving a B- in Psych 101, which was generous.
The point is, what I first thought I saw was actually the inverse of what was really there. I'd told myself what it was, rather than believing my eyes.
Dai Nippon was running analyses, bet your ass, but the industries under their silicon microscope weren't Japanese.
They'd computerized the financial report of every American company traded publicly and were now in the process of taking those outfits apart.
And I can assure you it was cold-eyed in the extreme, strictly hard numbers: quarterly earnings, long-term debt, inventory, stock outstanding, CEO bonuses. As any professional analyst would do, they'd cut right through a company's glossed-over excuses, phrases such as strategic retrenchment, aimed at the dividend-nervous retirees in Cedar Rapids. They were putting together the real story.
Same with the financial markets. Screens were scrolling up- to-the-second quotes on everything from three-month T-bills to thirty-year Treasury bonds. Computers were running arbitrage spreads on every issue. They knew exactly where they stood with all their futures contracts. I realized my little telephone boiler room had merely been the tip of some awesome iceberg.