Pass the Sake…

The last false dawn was in 2005 when a 40% run up in the market prompted an avalanche of western investors (doesn’t it always!) only for a seemingly inevitable slump over the next two years. It wasn’t always like this of course, Japan was the first great emerging market in the 1980s and by the end of that decade was the largest stock market in the world being 50% of global market capitalisation and dwarfing Wall Street. What followed was a bursting of the ‘bubble’ against which all subsequent suspects are compared, most usually Nasdaq in the late 1990s or maybe China or Commodities now. I...