National Tide 1980.

Ning Weimin and his family are enjoying a peaceful and comfortable life in France, but most people in this world cannot have such happiness.

In fact, during the time when Ning Weimin was hiding in peace, the entire world situation had been undergoing tremendous ups and downs.

Asia, Europe, the Middle East, America... There is no peaceful place in most parts of the world, and some things are even full of tragedy.

Khomeini's funeral was a shocking moment in Iranian history in 1989.

This happened on June 1989, 6, in Tehran.

The scale and degree of chaos are rare in history.

Although the United States and Western countries disliked Khomeini and regarded his death as good news, Khomeini still had a high status in the Middle East.

Leaders in places like Lebanon and Syria publicly mourned him.

The Iranian people in particular have deep feelings for him. For this reason, on the day of his funeral, more than 200 million people spontaneously took to the streets to bid farewell to this leader, blocking Tehran to the point where no one could get in or out. The scene was so spectacular that it was jaw-dropping.

But because of this, the funeral eventually got completely out of control as the people who loved him scrambled for the shroud in the cemetery and turned into a major riot.

A total of eight people were trampled to death, more than 400 were injured, and thousands more were sent to hospital due to heat or self-harm...

At the same time, Romania's political situation showed signs of instability.

Six senior officials jointly wrote a letter to publicly criticize the ruling Nicolae Ceausescu, accusing him of messing up the economy and harming people's livelihood.

The letter was spread across the country through Radio Free Europe, and many people expressed their support, feeling that someone had finally spoken out their voices.

But the headstrong Ceausescu ignored these criticisms and continued to do as he pleased, unaware that dissatisfaction with him had accumulated to an extreme level across the country...

During the same period, another superpower that once confronted the United States could no longer afford the bottomless pit of military spending and chose to gradually withdraw from the Eastern European stage.

The "Cold War" has finally come to an end as time goes by.

This process is like a giant silently bidding farewell to the stage. Although silent, it has a far-reaching impact...

But even so, things were not so smooth for the Western world during this period.

Especially Britain and the United States, they are in no mood to sit back and watch other countries laugh at their jokes as winners.

As for the UK, since 1988, British writer Rushdie has received death threats because of his novel "The Satanic Verses".

The book was banned in Iran, where it was the late Iranian leader Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini who placed a $300 million bounty on Rushdie’s life.

Although Khomeini is dead now, Rushdie is in even greater danger, and the matter has almost become a dead end.

Not only did the British government break off diplomatic relations with Iran, but it also had to send a 007-like agent to implement a -hour protection plan for Rushdie, exhausting all means to keep him incognito and save his life.

As for the United States, it suffered even greater disasters because no matter how powerful a country is, it cannot fight against the forces of nature.

On October 1989, 10, a major earthquake occurred in San Francisco, USA, with a magnitude of 17 on the Richter scale, killing more than 6.9 people.

This was the second largest earthquake experienced by the continental United States in the 20th century, second only to the world-famous 1906 magnitude San Francisco earthquake in 8.6.

The economic losses caused are estimated to be US$10 billion, and millions of residents suffered from power outages, computer failures, severe traffic congestion, and affected normal work and life.

The earthquake cut off travel and damaged San Francisco International Airport.

Highways, bridges, airports, and the Gulf Express were temporarily closed.

In San Francisco and its surrounding areas, tall buildings shook from side to side and glass fragments were scattered everywhere.

A building collapsed in the Bay Area.

Fires broke out in several places in the city, with a huge fire raging in the Marina district.

Water pipes were damaged and firefighting efforts were hampered.

When the earthquake occurred, the third baseball game was being held at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

After the venue shook for 15 seconds, fortunately there was no major damage, and 6.2 spectators celebrated that they had escaped the disaster...

In view of the above circumstances, we have to say that the country that has enjoyed the most prosperous and comfortable life this year is probably Japan.

There are no natural disasters in Japan, nor is there the threat of war. Almost everyone is a wealthy person, and the economy is truly strong.

This year, while Japan's stock and property markets were booming, Japan's per capita GDP not only surpassed that of the United States, but its corporate overseas direct investment also set a record high.

A typical example is Mitsubishi Estate's purchase of New York's landmark building, Rockefeller Center, for US$8.46 million.

Sony bought Columbia Pictures for a whopping $34 billion, making it Japan's largest overseas acquisition at the time.

After this cross-border acquisition, there was even a Colombian girl dressed as a geisha in a kimono on the cover of the American "Newsweek", with the headline "Japan Invades Hollywood".

It can be said that although Japan has lost an emperor, it still seems to be prosperous in the Heisei era.

Therefore, Japan's domestic media have repeatedly promoted the so-called "Heisei boom" this year, directly comparing the current economic situation with the prosperous periods in Japanese history.

However, Japan does have serious problems of its own.

For example, when it comes to overseas investment, some Japanese are clearly aware that as the threat from the Soviet Union weakens, Japan, as an "economic challenger," will become America's number one enemy.

In the eyes of these people, the reconciliation between the United States and the Soviet Union has created "suffocating and heavy pressure" on Japan. The history of the US-Japan confrontation in the 1930s is still vivid in their minds and will "repeat itself in a similar form" in the future.

Sure enough, Americans think so too.

In addition to "Japan Can Say No", other best-selling books in the United States this year include "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" and "Buying American".

"The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" looks at the increasingly intense economic frictions between Japan and the United States from the perspective of alternation of hegemony, and elevates the maintenance of the US-Japan trade balance to the level of maintaining the US hegemony.

And Buy America claims that the Japanese "have purchased American companies" and "American jobs and welfare are controlled by foreign countries!"

The U.S. Defense Advisory Committee even pointed out in its 1989 report that the United States can no longer consider national security issues solely from a military perspective, but must view economic interests as an important part of national security.

When the Japanese were discussing, "When did the United States become Japan's 41st prefecture?"

In fact, Americans have long been wondering who won World War II and who won the "Cold War"?
For example, in Japan today, anyone can see that the Japanese economy has already had a bubble.

If nothing else, the super money-making movement in real estate and the stock market is clearly abnormal.

Japan's export industry, in particular, has been hit hard by the rapid appreciation of the yen.

On the one hand, the domestic wage level in Japan has increased rapidly, and the phenomenon of "cutting up the green fields" has appeared in the employment of college students - in order to compete for talents, companies have signed contracts with students who have not yet graduated three years in advance.

Any Japanese graduate who completes a graduation training program can receive a bonus of 1 million yen, and the highest signing bonus is 3 million yen. Companies all over Japan are begging graduates to join them.

After all, as long as someone enters, they can get the government's yen subsidy, which is a huge sum of money. Japan's printing press is also frantically running a large amount of yen to subsidize enterprises, and the result is that enterprises just recruit people for the sake of recruiting people.

The sharp rise in Japan's labor costs has also further hit Japan's entire export industry.

Although Japan's precision machining industry has basically achieved robotization at this time, the labor cost is still not low.

As a result of this super doubling, Japan's export industry quickly declined and corporate debt expanded rapidly.

In 1980, the scale of debt was only 23.72 trillion yen, but by 1989 it had soared to 106.6 trillion yen.

Japanese companies are generally heavily in debt.

Moreover, since the Japanese value loyalty and often stay in a company until they die, it is often difficult for companies to fire employees.

As a result, the more people a company hires, the more debt it incurs, its products become more expensive, and its competitiveness becomes increasingly weaker, forming a vicious cycle.

To solve this problem, the Japanese government implemented a tight monetary policy in 1989 and began to raise interest rates.

However, this policy failed to improve the long-term economic slump and instead triggered political changes.

On June 1989, 6, Uno Sosuke succeeded Takeshita Noboru as the 2th Prime Minister of Japan, becoming the first Japanese Prime Minister to take office in the Heisei era.

At the same time, Uno Sosuke is also the first Liberal Democratic Party prime minister who is not a factional leader since the founding of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955.

However, no one expected that Uno Sosuke would be involved in a sex scandal three days after he took office as prime minister. A magazine under the Mainichi Shimbun revealed that he had spent 300 million yen to support a geisha in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, but did not pay for four months, nor did he pay the breakup fee according to the geisha's tradition.

At first, this incident did not cause a sensation in Japan, but when the US "Washington Post" reprinted the sex scandal from Japan's "Mainichi Shimbun", Uno Sosuke suddenly became notorious internationally.

Coupled with the Recruit scandal, the LDP suffered an unprecedented defeat in the Senate election that year, causing it to lose its majority control in the Senate, the lowest record in the LDP's history in Senate elections, while the opposition Socialist Party's seats jumped to 46.

Uno Sosuke had no choice but to announce his resignation the next day and officially left office on August 8, and was subsequently succeeded by Kaifu Toshiki.

Uno served as prime minister for only 69 days, making him the second shortest-lived Japanese prime minister in history.

In short, Japan today is like a rich man who is about to die from excessive drinking and sex. In extreme excitement and madness, all the health risks on his body are covered up by his lavish spending and generosity.

Most people only paid attention to his golden clothes and accessories, but no one cared that he was actually on the countdown to his death.

The Japanese, in particular, have already developed morbid superstition and madness.

They have turned this bubble economy into a performance art in which the whole nation can participate.

They firmly believe that their stocks, the Nikkei index, which has not fallen for three years, are blessed by divine power, and they believe that the Nikkei index will never fall.

Ignoring all warnings from economists, people's consumption ideas are becoming more and more crazy.

On the streets of Tokyo, white-collar workers live a life of luxury and spend all their income on entertainment venues and luxury goods.

Young people quit their jobs after working for one or two years because the returns from investment are N times that of working.

Some people spend millions on taxis, some use 10,000 yen bills to light cigarettes, and some companies give 1 million yen to new employees before they even start working.

All five-star hotels in Hawaii are booked by Japanese companies, and even the underworld has transformed into an "economic gang."

The Yamaguchi-gumi established the Kobe Credit Union in 1988, and in 1989, the scale of its loans exceeded 2000 billion yen...

In short, looking from the perspective of the times, Japan's bubble economy is like a fascinating kaleidoscope.

Each piece of glass reflects a different aspect of capitalism - the greed of financial capital, the arrogance of technocrats, and the blind optimism of mass psychology.

Few people involved can stay sober and restrain their greed, even though Japan has reached a dangerous point on the verge of a change and is on the verge of collapse.

Needless to say, Ning Weimin's opponent, Takahashi Osaka, a figure known as the bubble economy, is the leader of this collective madness.

In fact, during the time when Ning Weimin was away from Japan, in addition to considering the attack on Ning Weimin's industry as a kind of pleasure and being willing to target it with an attitude of protracted war, his EIE also made great efforts to utilize the financial support of the bank for efficient external expansion.

In Hong Kong, he bought one of the buildings in the Lippo Center for 38 billion yen and established Akeno Utopia. In order to develop a golf course in Honolulu, he established the Royal Oahu Resort for 55.5 billion yen.

In order to facilitate the acquisition of local real estate in Paris, France, he also invested 30 billion yen to set up a real estate company in France.

In addition, he invested 15 billion yen in the Hyatt Regency Tahiti in Hawaii, 4.4 billion yen in the Regent Hotel in Fiji, acquired 40% of the shares of the Regent Hotel in Bangkok for 3.6 billion yen, and opened a floating island hotel in Vietnam.

Some of this information was reported by the media, and some was obtained from within EIE. In short, private detectives from Tokyo, Japan finally made timely reports to Ning Weimin in France.

After Ning Weimin summarized the details, the first thing he saw was that Takahashi Oshinori's business front was extremely broad, and he didn't even know where to start.

After that, news came that Takahashi Osunori and Shangri-La Hotel Group began to cooperate, preparing to jointly invest 60 billion yen to build the Shangri-La Hotel in Tokyo, and to start construction of the Umenosato Golf Club.

What is even more surprising is that Takahashi Oshinori has made a high-profile entry into the Japanese entertainment industry and is about to invest 10 billion yen to jointly establish an artist agency with Jiaochuan Film.

From this, Ning Weimin further discovered that his open opponents and potential opponents seemed to have reached an alliance and were planning to join forces to target him.

They stopped pretending and Guo and Jiaochuan actually jumped out. This is really a surprise.

But to be honest, Ning Weimin was not afraid at all. He even felt a little sorry for his opponents.

Especially the poor Guo and Jiaochuan who teamed up with Takahashi Oshinori.

After summarizing the information and conducting his own research and analysis, he discovered that there were major loopholes in Takahashi Oshinori's investment, which could be said to be a fatal flaw.

First, the scale of his debt is too large, approaching one trillion yen, making him worthy of being called the daring "Keio star".

Give him some financial leverage and he would really dare to buy the earth.

Second, his investment was completely beyond his means. He only cared about getting the project but paid no attention to the actual operation.

It can be seen from the resort and golf club that he couldn't wait for the business he bought to get on track, so he started a buying spree in pursuit of new goals.

Such a career cannot be called a career at all.

If you work with such a person, the consequences will be tragic.

However, the most magical thing in reality is that the more Takahashi Oshinori continues to buy, the higher his EIE valuation will be.

Ever since Ning Weimin asked Kenichi Sagawa to buy EIE shares on his behalf using a Daiwa Securities account, he has made a profit of 42% in the past six months. It seems that the market value of EIE will soon reach the 2.5 trillion yen mark.

This made him increasingly unable to control his inner turmoil even though he was now in France, and he longed for the day of final judgment to come soon.

The day has come when he can return to Tokyo to seek revenge and settle personal scores.

There is no other way, even God is helping me... (End of this chapter)