Looking for A Locomotive
When the big names on the international financial scene gather here this weekend for a regular spring meeting of the Group of Seven industrial nations, what should they do to reassure the world that Japan's current financial sickness won't spread to the rest of the world?</br></br>If past is prologue for the G-7, they will echo Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's recent bland, not-to-worry assurances. Things are under control in Japan, they will say: It's healthy that an unsustainable speculative bubble in Japanese real estate and in stocks has burst.</br></br>In a limited sense, all of that is true. But it glosses over the fact that the crash in Japanese financial markets could be a trigger for enormous economic problems in a world already beset by a capital shortage and other difficulties.</br></br>Financial markets and government bureaucracies all over the world are struggling to get answers to questions such as these:</br></br>Does the collapse of Japan's stock market mean that the Japanese business recession will get worse this year?