ABSTRACT
Control over finance dictates what industries and companies and jobs exist. Thus the increased foreign presence in stock ownership and underwriting, asset management, investment banking, and insurance has truly momentous potential. All this progress hardly means Japan is a bed of roses for the foreign financial firms. Some of the harshest punishments have been meted out to institutions whose analysts have been strongly critical of the FSA’s actions and inactions on the bad loan front. Despite all this, the role and clout of foreign financial firms within Japan continues to grow dramatically. One measure of Japan’s increased sensitivity to global trends is the close correlation between movements of the yen and the Japanese stock market. Asset management, particularly pension fund management, is an enormous business, with all the public and private pension funds adding up to more than 300 trillion yen.
