FirstPoint Japan's Candidates section is now live (日本語話せる候補者に対して)

FirstPoint is not a recruiting or executive search firm, but rather serves as a platform for individual recruiters and executive search consultants as well as executive search agencies that who are ethically-certified by the Ethical Recruiting Alliance to advertise for and interact with bilingual candidates who are looking for opportunities in Japan or the greater APAC market as well as with Japan firms that are expanding their operations overseas.

候補者が抱く疑問は多くあります：

• キャリアの次のステップとして何がベストか？
  
• いつ、どのようにしてそれを得るべきか？
  
• 誰を使うべきか？どのようにしてリクルーターを選んだら良いのか？
  
• リクルーターとどのように生産性の高い付き合いをするべきか？
  
• 今の自分の業界から出るべきか？
  
• どのような機会があって、どのように機会を最大化するのか？
  
• どのようなリスクがあって、どのようにリスクを最小化するのか？
  

これらの疑問は、特に高い価値を持ち、異動してキャリアを築く候補者にとっては大変重要なものです。


候補者の方が人間的、職業的に成長していけることをゴールとしてサポートするのが私にとって重要であり、候補者へのプレッシャーや拘束は一切ありません。
下記が業界経験を基に候補者を支援した内容の一例です。 

OP-ED COLUMNIST
By PAUL KRUGMAN

A generation ago, Japan was widely admired — and feared — as an economic paragon. Business best sellers put samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese management; thrillers by the likes of Michael Crichton portrayed Japanese corporations as unstoppable juggernauts rapidly consolidating their domination of world markets.

Then Japan fell into a seemingly endless slump, and most of the world lost interest. The main exceptions were a relative handful of economists, a group that happened to include Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and yours truly. These Japan-obsessed economists viewed the island nation’s economic troubles, not as a demonstration of Japanese incompetence, but as an omen for all of us. If one big, wealthy, politically stable country could stumble so badly, they wondered, couldn’t much the same thing happen to other such countries?

Sure enough, it both could and did. These days we are, in economic terms, all Japanese — which is why the ongoing economic experiment in the country that started it all is so important, not just for Japan, but for the world.

In a sense, the really remarkable thing about “Abenomics” — the sharp turn toward monetary and fiscal stimulus adopted by the government of Prime Minster Shinzo Abe — is that nobody else in the advanced world is trying anything similar. In fact, the Western world seems overtaken by economic defeatism.

In America, for example, there are still more than four times as many long-term unemployed workers as there were before the economic crisis, but Republicans only seem to want to talk about fake scandals. And, to be fair, it has also been a long time since President Obama said anything forceful publicly about job creation.

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: May 22, 2013

TOKYO — The Bank of Japan stood pat on monetary policy Wednesday amid market jitters over volatility in bond markets, which has threatened to undermine the country’s battle to end deflation and stimulate growth in the giant economy.

In a unanimous vote, the bank’s board stuck to its strategy of expanding the monetary base at an annual pace of 60 trillion yen to 70 trillion yen, or $585 billion to $682 billion, through purchases of government bonds, commercial debt and other assets. Those moves pump money into the economy.

After the central bank’s meeting last month, it unleashed what analysts have dubbed a “shock-and-awe” monetary policy, a sea change for a bank that had come to be known in recent years for its caution and conservatism.

Under its new governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan has gone all-out to fight deflation. Declaring he would do “whatever it takes” to combat falling prices, Mr. Kuroda last month announced that the bank would seek to double Japan’s monetary base, as well as the bank’s holdings of Japanese government bonds, by the end of 2014. The aim of such a policy is to keep interest rates low, prompting consumers to spend and businesses to invest in growth and jobs.

In recent days, however, worries have grown about rising interest rates in the government bond market, which could threaten Japan’s monetary policy. Japan is vulnerable to rising borrowing costs because of its high public debt, which is twice the size of its economy. Bonds are also the main financial asset held by banks, pension funds and insurance companies, making a surge in debt yields perilous. The biggest concern for the central bank is volatility in the bond market, where yields are still above levels marked before its meeting last month, Cameron Umetsu, a strategist at UBS, said in a note published ahead of the decision Wednesday.

“This can be viewed as one of the ‘unintended effects,’ which, if sustained, could dilute the effectiveness of the new quantitative and qualitative easing framework,” he said.

The scale of Japan’s quantitative easing is striking. Assuming that the Japanese economy grows by 2 percent a year, the Bank of Japan would expand its assets to just under 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to estimates from CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s assets, which now total about 20 percent of the American economy, and the European Central Bank’s assets, which come to about 28 percent of the euro zone’s G.D.P., pale in comparison.

Japan stands out in another important way. Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in December and has been the main champion of the bank’s new audacity, Japan is coupling its monetary push with heavy government spending, contrary to calls for austerity in the United States and Europe.

Author: Edward Hugh

The future never resembles the past – as we well know. But, generally speaking, our imagination and our knowledge are too weak to tell us what particular changes to expect. We do not know what the future holds. Nevertheless, as living and moving beings, we are forced to act. – John Maynard Keynes

Discussions of the population problem have always had the capacity to stir up public sentiment much more than most other problems.
- Gunnar Myrdal

Last Thursday the yen broke through the psychological threshold of 100 to the US dollar. On Friday the slide continued (see chart), even dropping very close to 102 to the USD at one point before strengthening slightly on the run in to the G7 finance ministers meeting.  

The ostensible source of the sudden shift was a news release from the Japanese Ministry of Finance detailing the fact that Japanese investors bought a net total of 514 billion yen ($5.2 billion) in foreign bonds during the two weeks to May 3. Speculation had been rife that Japanese money funds would start to respond to continuing yen weakness and low Japanese yields by investing abroad. It is still far from clear that this is really going to happen in the short term, but nonetheless the news was sufficient to spark bets on more yen weakness.

Naturally the fall has drawn comment, especially during the run up to last weekend’s G7 meeting. US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told CNBC that while Japan had “growth issues” that needed to be dealt with its attempts to stimulate its economy needed to stay within the bounds of international agreements to avoid competitive devaluations.”I’m just going to refer back to the ground rules and the fact that we’ve made clear that we’ll keep an eye on that,” he said in a comment that was widely seen as drawing a red line in the sand.

But really, what else do external observers expect? On 4 April Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda announced he was going to increase the money base by 1% of GDP per month for the next two years. That is to say Japan’s monetary expansion will be incremental and continuous. Kuroda has even stated he will continue to increase the money base beyond the initial 24 months if the targeted inflation doesn’t come. It was always clear that the country was going to have a difficult time trying to generate inflation and that one of the knock-on consequences would be to continually weaken the yen. So you can’t realistically expect him to turn round and say now, “sorry, we didn’t know it would offend you so,  I’m cancelling the policy”. Anyway, that move would throw financial markets straight into turmoil. Didn’t they understand what they were signing up to when they accepted “Abenomics” at the last meeting?

Obviously there is still a considerable amount of confusion around about what exactly Japan’s problem is, and what the policy is trying to achieve. I have tried to examine the more theoretical background to the problem in my  A-b-e of economics post, but looking through the comments to that piece I realised that I was very tightly focused on one, examining only one aspect of what has come to be known as Abenomics, the inflation targeting component and its theoretical justification. Since ideas about what exactly it is the Japanese government is trying to achieve seem to be many and various, I thought it might be worth coming back and taking a second look at the experiment.

Three Arrows Into The Sunset

The aim of Abenomics is obviously to shake Japan out of its deflationary lethargy and return the country’s economy to a more pronounced growth path. In order to achieve this Japan’s Prime Minister has notoriously identified three policy arrows, or transmission mechanisms:

1) Aggressive monetary easing

2) Strong fiscal stimulus

3) An extensive programme of growth enhancing structural reforms

Achieving the inflation target is effectively the key objective of the first arrow, and weakening the yen is basically the transmission mechanism which achieves the objective. In fact while we have heard a good deal concerning the first two arrows, there is still relatively little on the table regarding the third one, as some commentators have started to wryly note.

The champagne used to flow at Heartland, the bar in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills complex that drew bankers from the Japan headquarters of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. upstairs.

“Every day, there was a party,” said Mai Shioya, the 39- year-old manager, who started in May 2008 before the global financial crisis that led to Lehman’s bankruptcy.

Bankers in well-cut suits would come in about 5 p.m., hand bartenders corporate credit cards and let their friends charge drinks to the tab until 2 a.m., said Michio Nakamura, 45, who’s been running events and entertainment at Heartland since its opening as part of the famed Roppongi Hills development in 2003. After the financial crisis, many disappeared, cutting revenue by 30 percent, Shioya said.

“Those customers and that age have gone,” she said.

The void is being filled by a new group of bar patrons: information-technology workers. While financial firms have cut staff in Japan, technology companies have boosted hiring, and as bankers vacated offices at Roppongi Hills, companies including Google Inc. (GOOG) and Lenovo Group Ltd. (992)moved in. As early as this month, Apple Inc. (AAPL) will also make the complex its home in Japan, two people familiar with the plan said in January.