The economic collapse of Japan and the Phoenix Suns

Most of you have heard about the Japanese gdp report; it implies an annualized rate of decline of almost 13 percent.  OK, they depend on exports but why is it so dire there? 

You also may have heard that the Phoenix Suns have been trying to unload All-Star players Amare Stoudemire and Shaquille O'Neal.  They are not hoping to get equal talent in return but rather they need to lower their payroll.  (Why pay $75 million a year for a fringe playoff club?)  And the New Orleans Hornets, former contenders, traded center Tyson Chandler simply to unload his salary.

I think of the Suns or Hornets as similar to a highly leveraged institution.  I don't know the debt level of their corporate structure but that is not the point.  The Suns have been spending lots in recent years toward the goal of ever-rising prices for season tickets and corporate boxes.  Does that strategy sound familiar?  If the future price hikes don't come on the main asset, they can't afford their obligations and so they will try to shed illiquid and hard-to-value assets into an unwilling market.  Sound familiar?  (As an aside, I wonder if barter is one way to jump start trading in illiquid financial assets.)

Does this sound familiar?:

"You've got a market loaded with motivated sellers and only a very
small group of buyers," one NBA executive told ESPN.com. "It's really
ugly. Owners are scared to death right now."

Institutions can have receipts and obligations which require growing revenues even if they don't have much explicit debt on their books.  I think also of the artistic non-profits which invested in expensive facilities, in the hope of ever-rising donations from their investment banker patrons.  Many other parts of the economy may be "leveraged" in this fashion, with or without high levels of debt.

Japan, of course, has high levels of government debt and also a demographic problem.  I wonder whether their future-oriented export strategies make them even more leveraged, de facto, in a manner resembling the (former) business strategy of the Phoenix Suns.

One lesson of this crisis will be how deep the concept of leverage extends.  That's another reason why this is fundamentally a crisis of sectoral shifts.

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