LONDON -- The other day a British businessmen, recently having visited Japan, recounted the words of a leading Japanese ship-owner. "Our ships" said this individual with a sigh, "are going fully loaded to Europe and America but these days coming back empty."
Of course, this oversimplifies, but the message is clear -- and for the Europeans especially chilling. The Asian world -- including notably a reviving Japan, and to a rapidly increasing extent, China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia -- is supplying more and more of Europe's and America's needs, but the West is not reciprocating. The old and cozy image of trade being a two-way beneficial flow between East and West is fading fast.
There used to be a sort of superior view that the West, and Europe in particular, would do all the thinking, innovating and designing, and the East with its cheap labor would churn out the more basic items. In due course, the cheap labor would become more expensive as incomes rose and everything would be evened out again smoothly in the world trade balance.