■ Japan's Debt
Kimura's plan may bring pain
Takeshi Kimura, the latest hired gun in Japan's offensive on US$430 billion in bad debt, has the ruthless tactics that the nation needs to clean up crippled banks and rebound from a decade-long slump, investors say. The 40-year-old president of KPMG's Japan unit, appointed by Minister of Financial Services Heizo Takenaka to a bad-loan task force yesterday, has advocated seizing banks and liquidating deadbeat borrowers. He has publicly criticized the government's failure to dispose of bad loans. Kimura's appointment may be a sign that the government, which bailed out banks twice in the last four years, is prepared to force lenders to cut off their worst borrowers, some investors said. That may drive more companies and banks out of business, and exacerbate a slump in stocks, before clearing the way for recovery. "I agree with the hard-landing scenario Kimura is advoca-ting, even if that results in a short-term market crash," said Dai Nishiyama, a senior fund manager at SG Yamaichi Asset Management Co. "In the long run, that's going to get all the cancer out of Japan."
■ Publishing
`Forbes' subsidiary closes
In what has become a familiar story, a magazine formed to cover the rise of the digital economy has been done in by its decline. The Forbes family, which owns Forbes magazine, announced Thursday that it was closing Forbes ASAP, a magazine founded in 1992 to cover the digital economy. "There is no market for a dedicated new economy publication," said Monie Begley, spokeswoman for Forbes. The closure of the magazine, which was one of the first to seriously cover the Internet, is yet another sign of stress at the privately owned business magazine company. Forbes magazine, lost almost half its advertising pages in the past two years.
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