ABSTRACT
In 1989, Hong Kong investors bought the entire site of Canada’s Exposition. One hundred billion dollars of Asian trade passed through California. And Japan purchased more than 30 percent of America’s treasury bonds, the basis of the nations’s economy. In 1985, when Japan doubled the value of the yen, Japanese investors bought American real estate at bargain prices while the American trade deficit fell only marginally. By 1989, Japan had accumulated 20 percent of California’s financial equities, employed 250,000 Americans, and contributed 11 percent to the United Nation’s annual budget. Japanese takeovers of Australian companies increased sixteen times between 1984 and 1988. Across the Pacific, a devalued peso attracted Asian investments in Mexico while Japan’s financial aid helped to ease Mexico’s debt crisis. As a major importer from Asia, with military outposts scattered from Japan to the Philippines, America evinced a strong interest in the Asian renaissance and a degree of anxiety that Asian competition might weaken American preeminence.
