At last a rational explanation for the Japanese being prepared to pour their hard-earned money kamikase-style into Nippon Telegraph & Telephone shares to the point where they are now trading on an extra-terrestrial price-earnings ratio of 234 times at a time when the phone company is forecasting falling profits! We related in CI No 647 how nostalgia for the good old days of the early 1940s had shot into the best-seller lists a book suggecting that there was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to do Japan down – with Jewish-controlled IBM at the forefront – and part of the theory is that Jewish capitalists want IBM to take control of NTT: clearly the otherwise inexplicably foolhardy and asinine chasing up of the NTT share price is nothing less than national pride doing its patriotic duty, the man on the Osaka Shinkansen no doubt rightly gambling that even IBM’s rapacity would baulk at paying 234 times earnings for NTT.
