RE: Investors bet on Japan resilience
Exactly.
BTW - my heart goes out to those poor individual people who were in the midst of this disaster - from the looks of things this was a bit of a backwater area with modest working people - fishing, farming as a major element of the local economy. In some regards, not unlike Louisiana and Katrina, although hard to say the urban destruction was as bad in this case. No person deserves to suffer like they have through this.
Down in Christchurch the world has moved on, but they are still picking up the pieces as well - thousands of people there are relying on portable toilets in residential areas as the sewerage and water systems are destroyed. It will take years for New Zealand to complete repairs from the earthquake trauma they have suffered, as is the case in Chile as well, but nobody seems to care much about Chile as it doesn't affect our interests very much.
This may be in poor taste, but I've had a major bone to pick with the Japanese over continued whaling and their supposed "research" and "scientific" whaling in defiance of the overwhelming wishes of the world community. Ironic it is from the sea that they suffer this horrific injury. If you believe in some kind of karma in the universe ... whaling can't have helped. Also read a bit by a veteran of WWII in the Pacific - he said "I am still trying to like the Japanese". We had a good family friend who was the patriarch of his family, a decorated senior officer in the Canadian military, who was a guest of the Japanese POW system following the surrender of Hong Kong. He had difficulty with the Japanese mindset as well. And the scariest threat of all is China, that still hasn't got its dibs in for the evils visited upon them by Japan just 70 years ago.
Karma? Or geological inevitability?
Given I too live on the edge of the ring of fire, I try not to tempt fate at all - and I pay my earthquake rider every year too.
Sorry for the off-topic babble ... killing time while rationality "takes-five" from the stock market.
CG