Blinky's Bank: in Gov Ishihara we trust

[Taro Toporific]

The Bank of IshiharaThe J@pan Inc newsletter 05/28/03
With his usual gift for subtlety, Tokyo's right-wing Governor Shintaro Ishihara has chosen the middle of Japan's banking crisis to announce the creation of the country's first municipal bank... ambitious plans were laid out, and the projected image of the bank certainly did seem idyllic.

Tokyo City, backed with around 200 billion of taxpayers' money, will open a bank with no bad debts on its books and an avowed policy of lending to the capital's many small and medium-sized enterprises ... Disturbingly, he also boasted that his loans would not be constrained by the annoying convention of collateral.
...No matter how you look at this new municipal bank, it appears deeply flawed...The man has a background as a novelist, and we wonder whether this is not something of a return to form.
The first and most obvious point is that Tokyo's Municipal Government is many things, but it is not a bank...
When pressed of the point, the petulant Ishihara slammed it as a "yellow question." We wonder whether he was just irritated that his conceptual edifice has started to crumble so early in the game.