We recently visited Japan and South Korea to make the launch of our new Forbes Korea magazine. Japan is a strong, enormously capable country, but it has lost far too much of its confidence and appetite for risk-taking. We talked with many business, government and academic leaders, and the message from each was similar: Consumers won't buy, preferring to save at impossibly low interest rates; investors won't invest in risk-taking ventures, preferring to wait on the sidelines; and many companies are moving production offshore where manufacturing costs are cheaper. Unfortunately, the prevailing thought seems to be that if things are bad now, they could get worse, so the best course is to wait.
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