The Bubble Economy Japan's Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the '80s and the Dramatic Bust of the '90s

In the 2nd half of the 1980s Japan's financial madness and arrogance centered on a booming stockmarket and rocketing land prices. Then the boom when spectacularly bust, leaving in its wake a withered stockmarket, crashing land prices, mountains of bad loans, and an economy in recession. The Bubble Economy reveals how Japan is spending the first half of the 1990s paying off these excesses in a process that threatens the world's economies with dire consequences, and questions many of the myths built up around Japanese management, pointing to levels of incompetence never before thought possible. --from publisher description