Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi yesterday proposed privatizing Japan's postal service by 2017, creating the world's biggest bank with the mammoth pile of cash deposited at post offices by conscientious Japanese savers.
Koizumi aims to win over opponents in his own Liberal Democratic Party to the plan so he can submit legislation to Parliament this month, but he may face a tough battle.
There is also a risk that his plan, designed in part to subject the post office to market discipline, will enable the revamped company to overwhelm existing domestic private banks because of its sheer size and government associations.
"The fundamental issue is to make the postal service privately owned and privately run and have it stand firmly on its own feet," top government spokesman Hiroyuki Hosoda said.
The outline calls for splitting Japan Post into separate businesses for mail delivery, banking services and insurance starting in 2007. A fourth company would handle employee salaries and manage post office properties.
All four companies would be grouped under a holding company at first, but the umbrella organization would have to sell its shares in them by 2017.
In a concession to LDP lawmakers fighting privatization, the prime minister's plan says the new company would have a duty to provide service nationwide -- even in isolated areas where maintaining a presence might be unprofitable. The government would set up a ?1 trillion (US$9.3 billion) fund to help.
But the prime minister has stood firm on the key point of turning the company into a private enterprise that would have to pay taxes and be answerable to shareholders.
On the other end, critics worried that Koizumi's plan would fail to place enough restrictions on the new company, giving the huge bank an unfair advantage over its already private rivals.
"It will be a godzilla bank," said Jesper Koll, an economist at Merril Lynch. "It will be the beginning of an era of fierce competition with private financial institutions."
Japan Post boasts savings deposits of ?227 trillion -- some three times those of Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group Inc., which at ?67 trillion is Japan's biggest private holder of deposits.
The postal system has some 25,000 branches around the country, while Japan's seven nationwide banks combined have only 2,606 branches.
Japanese insurers are also worried that a giant privatized company would overwhelm the rest of the industry as it gains new powers to offer products and markets them more aggressively.
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
A former television news host and six military personnel — active and retired — have been indicted on espionage charges, Kaohsiung prosecutors said yesterday. Lin Chen-you (林宸佑), a former CTi News host and YouTuber, last year allegedly made videos at the direction of a Chinese agent criticizing the Democratic Progressive Party’s recall campaign, the Ciaotou District Prosecutors’ Office told a news conference in Kaohsiung. He allegedly received 4,325 tether coins for the videos from an unidentified person surnamed Huang (黃), believed to be an agent of a hostile foreign power, they said. Lin, also known as Ma Te (馬德), has a show named
RSS