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Was Tokyo's best party the very last snort of the bulls?

So there it was. A Friday night that should, on paper, have been bleaker than a Philip Roth novel.

The end of one of the most hideous weeks of Tokyo trading anyone can remember. Everywhere you looked, stocks were in freefall and this time it wasn’t just Japan that was slitting its wrists. Hong Kong was in a muddy, stinking ditch, the US was looking as shaky as some of those subprime mortgaged houses, and even that oh-so-persuasive story about the Chinese economic juggernaut looked in need of a trip to Kwik-Fit.

But, ahhhh…thank Bacchus for hedonism and the unrelenting drag of excess: at least there were still some bars where the champagne was splashing around like a coke-fuelled sailor at a Playboy pool party. The question is whether Friday’s insanity – one of the biggest bar bills ever amassed in a single night’s Tokyo boozing – will mark the last hurrah of a global economy on the edge.

You Can't Beat the Feeling! (of coffee and a snout)

It's so dull making endless sport of political correctness. Comedians and columnists have been dredging it  as material for years with the same thudding tedium that surrounds those collections of mis-written insurance claims. You know the sort: "In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole."

Actually (tee hee) that one is quite good. But as with political correctness we do, in our hearts, see the point being made despite the cack-handedness of the way it all comes out. It's essentially about making people feel a bit more comfortable, and, as such, is fairly hard to condemn.

But I wonder whether Japan may have taken the anti- political correctness thing too far. I mean there can't be many countries where Philip Morris and the Coca-Cola Company are happy to indulge in a crafty spot of joint-marketing.

Yesterday a Hokkaido Takushoku stock certificate spoke to me

A very happy, very disturbing (see below) new year from Urban Dirt. Apologies for the long delay since the  last post, normal service resumes from the next paragraph...

The pumpkin-fuelled mayhem of Halloween is well behind us, but Urban Dirt has started the year spooked. Spooked as it has never been spooked before.

You see, the malign manipulators themselves (and I’m assuming poltergeist, Casper and Carrie are in on this rotten mischief) have used their mysterious powers to warn us that a major financial institution will soon collapse. Today, tomorrow, New York, Tokyo – I don’t know. But “They” have sent me an unmistakable and chilling sign: 1,000 worthless shares in a bank that imploded exactly ten years ago…