Japan's jaded buyers
SENATORS may moan and congressmen may groan, but there is one American export to which the Japanese market has remained wide open. That is paper. The Japanese have consistently bought US Treasury bonds at the auctions. They have had their good and (perhaps more) bad times, if you measure their performance in dollars. Measure it in yen, and they have suffered immense losses. It dwarfs their experience in refinancing the British banks, which sold them the perpetual floating rate notes for which they now find no takers. It is — now that international recrimination is back in season — some- thing to complain about. It resembles the experience of the oil producers, who in the early and late 1970s found that they were selling their irreplaceable oil for depreciat- ing dollars, and responded both times by hoisting the price. What will the Japanese response be? They have been selling their bonds in these last weeks. They may be tempted to let the Americans try getting along without them.
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