Her named servants include Tachibana Ryuuji, her butler, Katsura Naomi, a maid, Saitou Keiko, her wet nurse and head maid, and Tokitou Aki, an orphaned maid sent over from the main house. Notably, Keiko apparently looks like Aki's mother, but Runa deems it best not to comment on it. (I wonder why? Probably nothing to do with the fact that Hikomaro was a famed womanizer, haha…)
It's pretty funny because there's a little family tree at the start of the book and it just straight up spoils this fact immediately. Yes, this "orphaned" maid is actually straight up her aunt. And this other maid who is definitely not her mom used to be her grandfather's mistress, and then got this job as a maid after the mistress thing stopped working out. The other maid is also a familial relation, though more distant.
Wow this is delightful. Your read-along blends great writing, a thorough appraisal of the work and how it fits into it's context, and a fantastic dose of humour. If the work is half as fun to read as this thread has been, I'll need to check it out.
It's pretty funny because there's a little family tree at the start of the book and it just straight up spoils this fact immediately. Yes, this "orphaned" maid is actually straight up her aunt. And this other maid who is definitely not her mom used to be her grandfather's mistress, and then got this job as a maid after the mistress thing stopped working out. The other maid is also a familial relation, though more distant.
Yeah, there's a lot of spoilers and stuff on the inserts and opening intro pages, so I tend to skip those when doing "first" reads, haha. Volume 3 is pretty egregious on this end, although the events it showed are pretty obvious. And yeah, the Keikains are... funny, haha. It's especially interesting how things turned out -- both Otsumaro and the maids are bastard children, but see how their treatment greatly differs.
Wow this is delightful. Your read-along blends great writing, a thorough appraisal of the work and how it fits into it's context, and a fantastic dose of humour. If the work is half as fun to read as this thread has been, I'll need to check it out.
Thank you very much! High praise haha, I'm really glad you liked it, this has been a lot more work than I expected because the author does their best to contextualize things in a compact fashion, but they're writing through multiple filters -- first that they're writing for a Japanese audience, which means the context they're writing is aimed towards them, secondly that they're writing in this particular era, with a lot of relatively obscure stuff going on if you don't follow certain parts of history, and finally writing from the perspective of someone who died sometime around 2008 or so, which means that a lot of Runa's decisions are informed by late 00s or early 10s information, rather than say, the information that we have even a decade or so beyond that.
Which is surprisingly a lot. For a quick off-the-hip set of examples, the first iPhone was released in 2007, and didn't have much market penetration beyond being a luxury brand for a couple years off from that. X / Twitter wasn't founded in 2006, and took quite some time to increase beyond that. Bitcoin, and yes I know crypto is a meme, but it's still hugely financially impactful, was made in 2008, and took some time to gain speed as well. That's not to say of various world events -- Obama was elected in 2008, but if you died a year or two later in Japan, what would you know about him compared to Bush? What about 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea -- sounds pretty important for someone with Romanov blood, huh?
Sometimes I don't know how deep this rabbit hole goes -- like, author, why are you stuffing all of this and these perspective games in a villainess light novel? And navigating it can be really difficult, haha. But right now, I find it pretty fun, and having read this series, the author I think is having a lot of fun too -- you can tell when an author really likes what they're doing, and like I said in the OP, passion drips off the page. I'm glad you're having fun too, and I hope you continue to do so -- and I hope you enjoy reading the books on your own too!
Previously on My Little Capitalist Can't Be This Diabolical, we got a little backstory, motivation, and Runa gained her first set of allies. With the power of a mortgage loan of 500 million yen and knowledge from another world, it's time to see the beginnings of the results. The first step of a villain's plan always works, but only the invisible hand of the market (lol) will know how it shakes out — and while we like to say talk to the hand, it's definitely not speaking to us. Alright, enough bad puns, let's get to it.
Chapter 2: The Lady's Flight
Part 2: Easy Come, Easy Go (A Little High, A Little Low)
Well we didn't have to wait too long for Runa's plans to start bearing fruit — by taking advantage of "the times" like her father did, "the times" gave her a return of 200 million American dollars. The returns from a certain US browser company listing landed her a hundred mil, placed within a "Moonlight Fund,"and various investment and shares in other IT companies gave her another 100 million dollars. Furthermore, Tachibana and Ichijou also played the foreign exchange market, although they didn't really go into detail on that. Thanks to foreign exchange rates being variable, Runa made another pretty penny, because originally the chicanery occurred when the exchange rate was 80 yen to a dollar. With the rate recovering to a hundred yen to a dollar, the profits went up to 50 billion yen (so something like, originally 200 million dollars ⇒ 16 billion yen in stocks and shares, transitioning to 20 billion yen, and then an additional 30 billion yen from foreign exchange markets. Pretty neat that for all that Runa's future knowledge with stocks, the larger part of the earnings was in the "safer" option of foreign exchange — delegation to a Tokyo bank manager is pretty strong, huh? Tachibana showing some real hidden depths too, it's no wonder why he was a vital ally, besides being an adult face on things.). There goes that mortgage, that's a real power fantasy right there.
As for the specific browser company, I'm like 95% sure it's Netscape Navigator, since the "Browser Wars" were kicked off by it. Just not absolutely sure, since I think that would timeskip things to around 1995? It's not unlikely, since glancing back, because while Runa initially did her look see of things around '93, she's "nearly five years old" when she goes to the bank, which would place the time at around either late '94 or very early '95. So, her being able to land Netscape before its IPO in August of 1995 is pretty viable, even with the loan already weighing down the very tight expenses Tachibana had to manage for the household. But geez, Ichijou and Tachibana must have been sweating with a 500mil yen loan weighing things down for those couple of months, especially with the possibility of the value of Runa's home falling looming in the horizon. The feeling from when Netscape went from 28 bucks a share to about 75 before settling at a cool 58 or so dollars per share at the end of the god damn day must've been crazy. Especially when the initial share price was meant to be around 14 dollars.
Well, not just that loan though — they had to put up further collateral. That collateral included the entire Far Eastern Life Insurance company, as well as cash obtained via, in the words of a technical term in the business, borrowing "insane amounts of money" with a Japan premium (I'll explain this in the Glossary, but essentially extra amounts of money you need to pay up in the interest when you have a crapload of debt). Now, you'd think it's really bold and irresponsible to put up the life insurance corporation, but when the alternative is the real estate companies, you have to offer up something that's actually worth something, you know? But also, you know, this is hardcore capitalism at work — "boldness" and "irresponsibility" is part of the core experience. Not that the Life Insurance company wasn't suffering badly, though.
pic unrelated
Actually, let's do a quick breakdown of the Far Eastern Group, to keep track of what's up. The Far Eastern Group is split up in four different companies: Far Eastern Bank, Far Eastern Developments, Far Eastern Hotels, and Far Eastern Life Insurance. Far Eastern Developments, Far Eastern Hotels, and Far Eastern Bank are tied up in an incestuous web of bad debts, because Developments constructed Hotels, and the Bank gave loans to Developments to get land. Bubble burst, and down it all goes. Far Eastern Life Insurance is a subset of the Bank — and so when the Bank got hit bad, so did this company's management. As Developments was the one taking loans, it's the source of most of the bad debts.
As Developments is deep in the hole, it needs to undergo corporation rehabilitation proceedings, a la Chapter 11 Bankruptcy mentioned in Chapter 1, I believe. It's the same gist anyways — it happens if there's a risk that debtors can't pay or if debts exceed assets, or if the debtor can't pay debts without it being unable to continue the business normally. However, similar caveats — needs a supervisor, and the petition will be dismissed if the debtor won't make a plan, the plan devised won't be approved by creditors, and if the plan won't be approved by the court. There's a lot more details in here if you want — scroll down to Question 3, I'm not trying to get a minor in Japanese Business and Finance Law or whatnot. That being said, it's pretty fascinating that creditors can't take initiative or control proceedings — the debtor / trustee can control almost the entire set of proceedings.
The "plan" that Runa outlines is that the Moonlight Fund, her basically nascent sovereign wealth fund (state-owned investment fund that aim to grow state wealth and also respond to financial crises, because they can move quickly since they're actually on the market. Runa's group isn't actually a nation (yet lol) but it's basically acting as one, afaik), will purchase the Hotel company from Developments for about 30 bil yen, which will give Developments capital to potentially be able to actually get the petition through court and repay its debts. The bank will then take on the remaining 15 billion yen debt, finish that off with the recent nutty investment earnings, and then the Moonlight Fund will then use its remaining 20 billion yen to buy out Far Eastern Life Insurance's shares in the bank, which will give Runa the ability to support Ichijou in board decisions, as between those shares and a third-party allocation of shares, she'll own a third of the bank. In the news article below this passage that shows this in a public perspective that basically has it as the "Keikain group taking care of affiliate bad debts," and in private it's deemed as Tachibana, Runa's public face, just taking care of the mess of her parents.
As is classic after "get rich quick" scenes in media, the following scene is Runa somewhat basking in the wealth — she's requested a hundred million yen, wrapped up and secured, with a security guard staring at this bizarre sight. There's an important quote here—
Article:
"This is enough to buy some unfortunate soul's entire life. I'm in the middle of processing the profoundness of it all."
Runa's finally really processing that she has real, hard money. She just paid off Aki's university fees in a blink (with Keiko in near-tears over it basically confirming it IC that she's Aki's mom). She won't be homeless. Huge amounts of money was just produced, and it just changed people's lives — for the good, this time. This is the fundamental, basic theme of the series — that huge amounts of money correlates to power, and huge amounts of power can change people's lives. No matter what, using that money and power will alter the course of people's lives — "just" a hundred million yen, a fraction of a percent of Runa's schemes can purchase someone's life (and considering salaryman stuff, this may be rather literal — scroll down to "The Company is Father. The Company is Mother" section).
Interrupting this scene is Ichijou, coming in with some bad news — the bank's Ministry of Finance clerk says Ministry of Finance is sniffing around, unhappy over the elimination of the debts. Why is that so, you would wonder — isn't eliminating the debts a good thing? Well, it's complicated — first, the Moonlight Fund is American, and it's not exactly happy about that, because the MoF's regulations can't touch it. Furthermore, there's a bit of right hand, left hand going on here — the MoF is a vast behemoth of regulation, with the financial section being split into sections for banks, insurance, and securities (for the purpose of a casual readthrough, things like stocks, options, etc), all of which can't step on each other's toes. And with the Moonlight Fund poking a hole with Far Eastern Bank in the operations of the MoF, it went "haha, what the fuck just happened?" and hopped on it really quick. It really doesn't help that part of the crisis happened because of corporations and financial institutions going way beyond their mandate in the pursuit of profit and getting out of bad situations, so…
In any case, the MoF's anger has real threat, because Far Eastern Bank's president was a former MoF employee, which basically means that they can exercise levers if need be and remove Ichijou. Thus, Runa orders him to lay low, but to begin investing in domestic IT corps, because with Netscape's IPO, the dot-com bubble was preparing to wash over Japan as well — Windows 95 released to retail on the 24th of August.
(Windows 95 is a really big deal — it gave a GUI (Graphical User Interface) attached to the OS, complete with a taskbar, a start button, notifications, etc. All of the core bits of Windows, and to be honest a lot of other OSes? Came from here.)
A bit of warning — this is gonna get a little technical, lol. Honestly though if you're reading this, I would recommend doing some stretching and drinking some water. It's always a good time to do so.
In order to continue investing / scaling up operations under the MoF's scrutiny though, Tachibana, as a shareholder of the bank, needs to get a brokerage firm, for a number of reasons. What is a brokerage firm, to be exact? It's essentially a middleman that helps match up sellers and buyers for various stock-related things, such as shares, bonds, options, etc. This is important because it makes the Ministry of Finance and the bank manager a lot more comfortable — this'll properly delineate jurisdictions for the "securities" and the "bank." There's also a pretty big degree of insulation, as outlined in this article — brokerage firms are structured differently from banks wherein the gambling stock activities are done in separate, segregated accounts. This is in contrast to to what a bank does, where people deposit money into it and they pay them a low interest rate, and then they take that money and loan it out to people for higher interest rates. Notably, these accounts are not separated.
(Sidenote: because a bank is loaning out other people's deposits, if enough depositors come asking for the deposit all at once, this can cause a "bank run" like with what happened last year with SVB, Silvergate Bank, and Signature Bank. This is pretty bad because there's the whole entire chance they don't have the actual money on hand to give you back, though ironically, the fears of this happening that drive bank runs often cause the thing they fear so much.)
(Second sidenote: That being said, banks don't gamble with all of their customer's money— there is a cash reserve mandated by the government in America, and there's FDIC insurance (insurance for depositors) that insures up to 250k USD per institution / category in case the bank fails (In sidenote-ception, while I am near-certain that nobody reading this thread has more than 250k USD in a bank without a financial adviser, but in some godawful universe there is, I'd think really hard about it). A similar system exists in Japan — there's a reserve requirement system and a Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan.)
This distinction between "securities" and "banks" is why from an external perspective, it kind of looked like Ichijou was doing some hardcore gambling with the bank's money, which had huge risks since you know, they were already in a bad debt crisis. In this case, by all respects this was also very much true, and this was done on a literal five year old's advice. A five year old, by the way, whose father disgraced himself to the point of suicide in part over gambling on bubbles.
In any case, there's a pretty big degree of separation — when Lehman Brothers (a company which had a bank and a brokerage), as a very random and totally unrelated example, bit it, the bank's failure didn't really affect the brokerage's customers all that much, because customers were protected by the fact that assets and bank assets were separate as well as the fact that the SIPC exists (basically also works as insurance for securities, when a broker-dealer fails, it aims to distribute assets and such to investors. If that doesn't work out, it'll pay up to 500k in missing securities per investor, and also up to 250k for missing cash. Obviously when a firm is failing it'll try to take steps and transfer stuff to other firm, but if it's curtains it's liquidation o'clock).
Holy fuck that was a lot of dry stuff, but I was a little confused the first time I read it, so I figured semi-exhaustively explaining it would be better safe than sorry. Let's move on for a little bit. There's a bit of a decision on whether or not they should either just buy a brokerage firm outright, with accumulated institutional knowledge and employees but the risk of the firm's debts just wiping out their profits wholesale, or if they just need a puppet to just get a couple of warm bodies and then making a new firm outright. Runa figures that she can put it off for a little bit. However, while she can take advantage of "the times," "the times" won't wait for her to move. After all, it's not only her that "the times" is affecting.
The author lays the groundwork for this in the next scene, where Runa is cheerily eating a sweet treat while talking to its creator, one of her maids, Katsura Naomi. Miss Naomi is yet another one of the Keikain by-blows, this time not of Hikomaro, but of his younger brother. Her life isn't amazing, but she made her peace with it, and she's very proud of her son. Her son doesn't work at a Keika bank, actually — he hates exercising family connections, in fact. Instead, he works at a fairly prestigious bank, even more prestigious than Far Eastern Bank — Hokkaido Kaitaku Bank, in the integrated developments department.
Unfortunately for him, Hokkaido Kaitaku is one nail away from being buried and triggering a landslide of other failures — and its integrated developments department is the one with the most massive set of bad debts.
(Integrated developments, from my understanding, are aiming to have a single location that has like, work/commercial uses, residence with full amenities, and transport under one roof. So basically you'd have residential areas, and then commercial areas, and the connection to a bus or train. You can see why they'd uh, accrue a lot of bad debts under the real-estate bubble popping.)
March 1997 — Hokkaido Kaitaku Bank's basically almost collapsed. In contrast, Runa's fortune is going Buzz Lightyear — between her IT investments and the yen going to 120 to the dollar, she was neatly able to cancel the bad debts of Far Eastern Bank and come out even, while not even having touched her Moonlight Fund investments. With so much capital, and things being as dire as they are, she decides that she might as well buy a brokerage firm now, debts or no debt. Her target is Sankai Securities — a second-tier brokerage firm about to go under, with the Ministry of Finance desperately trying to save it, because if it goes under, so do a lot of other firms, like Ichiyama Securities and one Hokkaido Kaitaku Bank. She makes a deal with the MoF — but if she's going to save Sankai, she's going to save them on her own terms, outlining the "Keika Rules:"
The C-suite / executives are fired, and anyone involved in crimes or otherwise is made to take suitable responsibility.
(And I think specific to this case) A Bank of Japan "Special Loan" will be given to protect from the crisis further or if the firm is bought out or merged.
(Sidenote: barring Runa's intervention, this is historically what occurred IRL. "Sankai Securities" IRL was known as Sanyo Securities, and Sanyo Securities defaulting was the first financial institution default in Japan since like, World War II. Initially judged that suspending operations and other preservation methods would be a clear solution with minimal risk of moral hazard, and an end to a lot of hard struggle with the failing financial institution, the Ministry of Finance didn't really think it would cause a systemic issue so the Bank of Japan didn't step in on this point. However, while it was just a minor borrower on the interbank market, its failure was the first ever failure on the interbank market. Thus it caused pretty big fears in the market, with institutions preferring to go with the stable Bank of Japan rather than go with the now seemingly unstable interbank market. This caused the interbank market to contract, especially combined with foreign creditors squeezing credit limits on already tight limits due to the deteriorating reputation of Japanese markets, paralyzing operations. All of this forced the Bank of Japan to step in which also made things scary because they're the actor of last resort, thus kicking down a set of dominos)
With no way out and the strangely-successful Far Eastern Bank outstretching its hand, the Ministry of Finance agrees. No golden parachutes for the executives, but the workers and people who had money in it will be bailed out. The firm is purchased for 40 billion yen, corporate rehabilitation begins for it and its child company Sankai Finance, and Far Eastern's investments will make good the insolvency. With the loan providing an extra cushion, surely the firm collapse chain reaction won't happen, right?
Not four months later, Runa is met with an unwelcome sight. Hokkaido Kaitaku's talks with another bank have broken down, and along with it, the pride of Katsura Naomi's son, Katsura Naoyuki. The man who despised making use of family connections is kneeling down in a full dogeza, forehead pressed to the floor, bags beneath his eyes. He's here, begging a seven year old for money, to an extent that even his mother is crying for him.
Runa is reminded of another time, a time just over ten years from now. An unending recession that drowned her, "moral obligation, money, and self-responsibility" the cement shoes dragging her down to the seabed. No one was there for her when she was falling, and no one was there for her when she died. And when she thinks about it, she's angry. Furious, even, at an era that formed a society where no matter how hard you worked, you would never be rewarded.
But here she is now, billions of yen to her name. She just bailed out a securities firm with a snap of her fingers. Runa goes on a bit of a mental spiral — she's a "villainess," doomed to lose, certainly, but only doomed to lose against the "protagonist." Against anyone, everyone else? She'd win, damn the hopelessness and despair. She calls up Tachibana and Ichijou, and tells her distant cousin that salvation is at hand, starting off with a hundred million yen. With the money she has, she can reach beyond just her own self. She could save the financial institutions, she could save the economy, but most importantly — she could save everyone who had suffered in her previous timeline, and damn the consequences.
And on that definitely very heroic note, we're gonna end this section here. This was probably a little boring but it was showing a bit of how the sausage was made. I hope I explained things well enough — I had a temporary fit of insanity where I contemplated on explaining the differences between different securities, like bonds, shares, options, etc, before my brain did an executive decision and said hell no because one, there's a lot of them, and two, this is already long enough. If you happen to be wondering if there's a difference between a securities firm and a brokerage, don't worry, I am too! From my understanding, brokerages are a subset of securities firms, but it just so happens when you look up a lot of the big securities firms, they tend to have a brokerage as well, so it's a little hard to tell apart lol.
On another note, here's this part of the chapter's glossary and notes section. No need to add additional bits to this one either, my sidenotes covered most of the ones I was gonna bother to, haha, so this one's pretty """short and sweet""" with three entries.
Japan Premium: This one is pretty simple. Appearing around August 1995, the "Japan Premium" was where Japanese banks had to pay additional premiums, i.e. increased interest rates, on Eurodollar (US dollar deposits held overseas) and Euroyen (yen deposits held overseas) interbank loans compared to their European and American compatriots. A sign of how bad the times were, they were borne out of the principle that if the banks were struggling, loans to them were more risky, so a higher interest rate was was necessary to protect the lender. This was especially brutal because all ten of the world's largest banks were headed within Japan in the 90s, in part because of their intense foreign borrowing in the 80s, which naturally meant there was a lot of foreign influence. When the crisis occurred and the Japan premium happened, international lending became rapidly unprofitable, pressuring Japanese banks to shrink, which naturally had many effects on top of all the other things the Japan premium caused.)
Foreign Exchange Market: Alright I'm not really explaining this one much either, it's well, a place where you can buy, sell, exchange, etc. currencies from around the world. The trick of it I assume is centered around the fact that Runa and co. started from when the yen was comparatively strong to the dollar, 80 yen to the dollar. They likely exchanged an eye-watering amount of yen for American dollars or whatever other currency that eventually resulted in them buying American dollars (also to you know, do dealings with American companies, but the larger part of the money seems to have been "playing it safe" rather than gambling on the stock market) which paid off for them when the exchange rate recovered up to 100 yen to the dollar and whirred up to an insane 120 yen to the dollar. Why does this matter, you wonder? They basically have the same amount of money, right. They have the same amount of money in the end. It matters because they can exchange those dollars back to yen, and you know what's in yen? The debts of the companies — meaning that they could pay things off that much easier, with a 25% to 50% increase in the purchasing power of their money in Japan, especially since the value of the yen in Japan wasn't necessarily inflating/deflating in this time period, but rather just in comparison to American currency.
Ministry of Finance (Clerk): this is honestly just here for me to go into a bit of detail on the Ministry of Finance. First off, though, the bank's MoF clerk (these days apparently known as Financial Service Agency clerks since I assume scope's expanded) duty is to negotiate and liaise with the Ministry of Finance, rather than what I initially thought of being a Ministry of Finance clerk that the bank is just connected with. Anyways, the Ministry has a long-ass history, originating when the "Ōkura" was established in the 6th century as a state treasury. While originally really strong, the 90s rocked them hard, especially with the Financial Service Agency, a financial regulator was formed to ensure stuff would never get this bad again. It's very involved in foreign exchange markets, and is split into six bureaus — the Minister's Secretariat, the Budget Bureau, the Tax Bureau, the Customs and Tariff Bureau, the Financial Bureau (boy is that fucking broad lol), and the International Bureau (hey at least they don't have one split off just for the Koreans lmao). They also nominally control six "Independent Administrative Institutions" (also known as "Incorporated Administrative Agencies"), which are basically legal corporations set up by the government, where the planning functions would remain within the ministries, while actual operation would be done in these independent agencies. They use private-sector management methods, and they also don't get government guarantees for fundings just like other private corporations, and also need to pay taxes, complete with corporate income tax and property taxes. The six that the MoF controls are the Japan Mint (where they produce and circulate Japanese coins), the National Printing Bureau (where they produce and circulate the paper money as well as postage stamps and official government newspaper), the National Research Institute of Brewing, the Nippon Automated Cargo Clearance System, the Commemorative Organization for the Japan World Exposition '70 (they apparently have a whole fund for this, but it seems to control funds contributing to international cultural exchange and goodwill, or international education or academic study? The Expo was apparently the first world's fair in Asia as well as Japan, so I suppose fair enough.), and the Japan Housing Finance Agency. Definitely a busy little bee — while weakened compared to the height of their power, they're still considered the top dog ministry in the government for a reason.
Once again, thanks for bearing with this comparatively pretty dry chapter — I feel a lot of it was necessary to build some heat for next chapter, but yeah, it's still a fair amount of technical stuff. Give a big round of applause to @Fayhem and @hYGP for helping this not be a huge wall of text smacking you over the head with a club. Please do continue leaving feedback — I'm always really happy to hear what worked and what didn't, and I'd really like to know if I got anything wrong so I should fix things. Commentary is also really motivating, this week's been crazy.
Anyways, bonus round — like I mentioned earlier, "Sankai Securities" is a thinly veiled pastiche of Sanyo Securities, the first Japanese securities house to collapse since WWII. Briefly mentioned but no less important was "Ichiyama Securities," which is (lmao) a pastiche of Yamaichi Securities, formerly one of the top four Japanese brokerages, whose losses were so bad they shouldered the debts of their clients and moved them off the balance sheet to save face, which… didn't really help. Finally, "Hokkaido Kaitaku Bank" was Hokkaido Takushoku Bank. We'll get into the weeds of it later next time, but the bank was pretty central to Hokkaido, having originally been placed there to help develop it. While very small scale, it had a pretty big reputation of being the bank of the people of Hokkaido, haha…
Anyways — see you next time! Feel free to speculate on what other shenanigans Runa might do, and what funny events might happen. If you've read enough CN / KR / JP novels that involve regression or traveling to this era, I'm sure you know something special regarding finance is happening around this time outside of Japan, haha…
sovereign wealth fund (state-owned investment fund that aim to grow state wealth and also respond to financial crises, because they can move quickly since they're actually on the market. Runa's group isn't actually a nation (yet lol) but it's basically acting as one, afaik),
Okay, this is going to sound very stupid, but since the point of SWF is that they are state-owned, wouldn't that just make Moonlight Fund a normal trust fund?
Anyways — see you next time! Feel free to speculate on what other shenanigans Runa might do, and what funny events might happen. If you've read enough CN / KR / JP novels that involve regression or traveling to this era, I'm sure you know something special regarding finance is happening around this time outside of Japan, haha…
For anyone who may not be clicking on every link, I recommend actually doing so with this one in particular. It's genuinely really interesting, and IMO hits a similar vibe to the one Blue's LR has of the author making potentially dry material engaging by integrating some colloquialism and humor into their explanations, so if you're enjoying this I think you're likely to like this article too. E.g.,
You might imagine that you heard a supervisor tell a young lady in the office "Hey, you're 30 and aging out of the marriage market, plus I hear you're dating someone who is not one of my employees, so you might want to think about moving on soon.", but that would be radioactively illegal, since Japanese employment discrimination laws are approximately equivalent to those in the US. A first-rate Japanese company would certainly never do anything illegal, and a proper Japanese salaryman would never bring his company into disrepute by saying obviously untrue things like the company is systematically engaged in illegal practices. So your ears must be deceiving you. Pesky ears.
It's a good read, and props to Blue for bringing such an extensive and informative set of references to a Let's Read that's already covering a lot of ground just in the text itself.
For anyone who may not be clicking on every link, I recommend actually doing so with this one in particular. It's genuinely really interesting, and IMO hits a similar vibe to the one Blue's LR has of the author making potentially dry material engaging by integrating some colloquialism and humor into their explanations, so if you're enjoying this I think you're likely to like this article too. E.g.,
For anyone who may not be clicking on every link, I recommend actually doing so with this one in particular. It's genuinely really interesting, and IMO hits a similar vibe to the one Blue's LR has of the author making potentially dry material engaging by integrating some colloquialism and humor into their explanations, so if you're enjoying this I think you're likely to like this article too. E.g.,
To emphasize how much of a freak I am, I hovered over the link and knew exactly which article this was and I probably haven't read it since it first hit the internet.
Okay, this is going to sound very stupid, but since the point of SWF is that they are state-owned, wouldn't that just make Moonlight Fund a normal trust fund?
In terms of absolute truth, yeah, but Runa operates vastly different from most of those funds or god forbid private equity. Her aim is to make money, yeah, but she (in later chapters) will re-invest it into infrastructure and similar, and her aims here are similar to governmental operations to bail out failing financial institutions rather than ripping them apart like vulture funds would. So in practice (although this is still mostly a joke right now), she operates similarly to what SWFs are supposed to do, operating for the welfare for "their" people.
("Their" people is a pretty ominous thing to say for someone who purportedly isn't acting on behalf of a state though, haha...)
Oh wow, yeah, okay, I wasn't expecting someone from there to be reading this thread, but you got it in one! Makes total sense haha. It's not gonna show up for a little while, but I hope I don't butcher it too hard when trying to contextualize / explain it.
For anyone who may not be clicking on every link, I recommend actually doing so with this one in particular. It's genuinely really interesting, and IMO hits a similar vibe to the one Blue's LR has of the author making potentially dry material engaging by integrating some colloquialism and humor into their explanations, so if you're enjoying this I think you're likely to like this article too. E.g.,
Yeah I kind of fortuitously came across it again when writing up this post, and it's a genuinely good read. It's a bit outdated -- written in 2014, and there are times when I don't fully agree with the author, plus a lot of their view is heavily filtered from being deep within the tech field, but their blog and this piece in particular are very interesting and great reads.
Gotta break up all the wikipedia and investopedia links haha... although a fair chunk of the links that aren't those are I think maybe academic articles, so yeah, this one is a bit of a breather. I really like the section about his relationship with his bank, I think you can get to it with ctrl+f "Taro," it's such a very interesting perspective and series of events.
This one, though obviously not the entire thing. The thing about the collapse about Sanyo securities and how that kicked off a bit of a reaction is dry but pretty interesting reading since it's mostly elided over in the novel. I genuinely how much of common knowledge it is over in Japan, tbh. Obviously if you don't know much about how banks and securities work I would highly highly highly recommend edifying yourself on that, but that goes without saying. The blogpost really is the most interesting reference though imo
To emphasize how much of a freak I am, I hovered over the link and knew exactly which article this was and I probably haven't read it since it first hit the internet.
Hoo boy, as a big fan of the whole villainess novel thing I was not aware of this one so thank you very kindly for introducing it to everyone. By the sounds of it this one is really going to go places and I am eager.
For anyone who may not be clicking on every link, I recommend actually doing so with this one in particular. It's genuinely really interesting, and IMO hits a similar vibe to the one Blue's LR has of the author making potentially dry material engaging by integrating some colloquialism and humor into their explanations, so if you're enjoying this I think you're likely to like this article too.
The company will mold you to their exacting specifications to do whatever form of service they require. You will happily comply, in this as in all things. For example, if your company needs a Java-speaking systems engineer and you have a degree in Art History, this is not a problem because you can be fixed. Sure it might take ten years and only work on a quarter of the new hires but that's why we employ you for 45 years and hire a hundred at once!
Yes, this "orphaned" maid is actually straight up her aunt. And this other maid who is definitely not her mom used to be her grandfather's mistress, and then got this job as a maid after the mistress thing stopped working out.
They sure are! Modern Villainess handles it interestingly, because uh, it takes everything seriously
So, would you want a literal child with a significant amount of control over your country's (and by extension a non-trivial part of the world's) economy?
I doubt that even I will pass on the opportunity to unfuck my job, especially when the kid villainess in question is as far from being a sappy character as you can encounter.
I doubt that even I will pass on the opportunity to unfuck my job, especially when the kid villainess in question is far from the sappy characters that you encounter.
I was referring to the situation in general works in this genre, not specifically this one. BUT, even if you are in "fuck it, had nothing to lose to try", there should be way more suspicions and not fully accept what the kid villainess said even if doing it/carry it out. Didnt help with how your average isekai/villainess talks that gave and can gave certain vibes that......... would make you even squint eyes even if it came from the mouth of an adult, never mind a literal child.
Nah, by colloquial genre conventions it's an isekai -- first because it's a different timeline, second because it can't be a regressor because regressors are generally reverting back in the same timeline to the same person. There's some more details, but it's an isekai.
The cement shoes bit is metaphorical, but yeah, times were tough haha. Drowning with no matter how much effort you put incapable of pushing you up and out.
The company will mold you to their exacting specifications to do whatever form of service they require. You will happily comply, in this as in all things. For example, if your company needs a Java-speaking systems engineer and you have a degree in Art History, this is not a problem because you can be fixed. Sure it might take ten years and only work on a quarter of the new hires but that's why we employ you for 45 years and hire a hundred at once!
Truly, the job security and re-specification of employees on display is remarkable.
At least for Keiko she's got some transferable skills involved there from being a... hostess? or something like that in Ginza so she has experience working with and serving high society, cold comfort that it is, but yeah, yeah... high society's treatment of its "fringes" and "castoffs" is pretty rough lol
I was referring to the situation in general works in this genre, not specifically this one. BUT, even if you are in "fuck it, had nothing to lose to try", there should be way more suspicions and not fully accept what the kid villainess said even if doing it/carry it out. Didnt help with how your average isekai/villainess talks that gave and can gave certain vibes that......... would make you even squint eyes even if it came from the mouth of an adult, never mind a literal child.
Mm, Simeon's right in part that it's very much "this is my last chance fuck it might as well," and also the fact that Runa kept on pushing forward and forward on the initiative in the conversation, and also that it seemed that another adult had already bought in and so it seemed somewhat less of a leap of faith on that front, it's part of why Tachibana being Runa's ally was so important. Also that in part, Runa's part of the family that owned Ichijou's ass, and Tachibana is extremely dedicated to Runa's well-being and working for her sake.
It's also not like Runa is in adult mode all the time -- she acts like a pretty normal child most of the time, happy with sweet treats and spending time with her "family," it's sort of just like an insanely intelligent child going all in when there's a crisis.
That's not to say that that isn't highly unusual either, it's just that it's not unheard of either -- this is a webnovel's interpretation of an "otome game" after all with high-spec male leads and such, and they're all pretty fucking weirdly mature in each of their own ways.
It's weird and suspicious in some ways but it's pretty acceptable both in-universe and in-genre conventions, so there's only so much realism gets to play in these circumstances -- you do have to buy in for the sake of the narrative, just a little. But you're right, though because realism does get to play even just a little, because while Runa can buy faith with those she interacts with just from sheer shock factor, and eventually after her initial moves, some actual credibility, it's still remarkably uncomfortable and unsettling to work on high-stakes economic and political moves with a literal child.
Just think of how the public would react when things get unclassified and that they got bailed out by a literal preschooler!
I'm sure this won't be relevant at all whatsoever haha...
It'd tell the public that economics was invented by coked up toddlers and their greatest feat was fooling everyone it's actually coherent and logically made by rational adults.
It'd tell the public that economics was invented by coked up toddlers and their greatest feat was fooling everyone it's actually coherent and logically made by rational adults.
That can't be right. There's schools and everything about it. So many theories of how it works too. Surely, there must be some underlying rationality, and not just a lot of momentum keeping a behemoth in motion.
Having not read the books, I read "has to somehow write a Japan where the protagonist can be part of a dukedom" followed by a discussion of zaibatsu and why they're gone in OTL, and assumed that meant the zaibatsu were taking the place of generic fantasy aristocrats. Which would make sense; "capitalist overlords are like medieval nobles" is a pretty common take.
This is weirder and less interesting.
The Allies lost at D-Day, and as a result Germany "fought until the very end," whatever that means. Maybe Hitler didn't off himself and there was no formal surrender or something?
I'm sure there were Nazi soldiers who hid in the Polish mountains for decades after the end of the war.
Quick as a bullet, she fires back — she's a woman. "What is the one thing women can do?" she asks, and her answer on why she wants access to the balance sheets is clear — marriage, to save the zaibatsu.
Li'l missy—ma'am?—little madam, you're in the bourgeoisie equivalent of preschool. I don't think there has ever been a social order where it's considered acceptable for three-year-olds to get engaged and normal for young girls to have a say in who they marry.
I had a "one or two feldspars" moment here. Balance sheets are the most straightforward kind of financial report, of course everyone understands what they represent!
With the power of a mortgage loan of 500 million yen and knowledge from another world, it's time to see the beginnings of the results.
...
Well we didn't have to wait too long for Runa's plans to start bearing fruit — by taking advantage of "the times" like her father did, "the times" gave her a return of 200 million American dollars.
To put this in perspective: 500 million 1993 yen is equal to about $4 to $4.75 million 1993 USD, in our time line. (source) That's something like a 4,000% profit.
Runa made another pretty penny, because originally the chicanery occurred when the exchange rate was 80 yen to a dollar. With the rate recovering to a hundred yen to a dollar—
For reference, the JPY/USD spot rate (the exchange rate for buying one currency with another at the current moment, as opposed to a variety of more complicated ways to play the exchange market) has consistently been well above 100 for decades. According to the same source, It dipped below 100 for most of a year in the mid-90's (October 1994 to August 1995), then again from October 2008 to November 2013. This is another way that Modern Villainess's timeline diverges from our—
...since I think that would timeskip things to around 1995? It's not unlikely, since glancing back, because while Runa initially did her look see of things around '93, she's "nearly five years old" when she goes to the bank, which would place the time at around either late '94 or very early '95. So, her being able to land Netscape before its IPO in August of 1995 is pretty viable.
According to that hopefully-reliable source, the spot rate never dropped below 80 in 1995, but it reached ~81 in late April and ~97 in mid-August. So if we accept some rounding errors in Runa's favor, that fits okay.
...if we accept the assumption that alternate history nonsense stretching back to the Meiji Era and radically redrawing the Cold War map barely affected exchange rates. Which is a pretty absurd assumption that I hope Modern Villainess isn't making.
This distinction between "securities" and "banks" is why from an external perspective, it kind of looked like Ichijou was doing some hardcore gambling with the bank's money, which had huge risks since you know, they were already in a bad debt crisis. In this case, by all respects this was also very much true, and this was done on a literal five year old's advice. A five year old, by the way, whose father disgraced himself to the point of suicide in part over gambling on bubbles.
A five-year-old who is basing her financial advice on a timeline where zaibatsu haven't been a thing since the far edge of living memory, which I assume would affect the timing of financial bubbles. (I'm willing to accept that there would be a dot-com-like bubble in any timeline with websites and capitalism, but when it starts and stops are other matters entirely.)
Having not read the books, I read "has to somehow write a Japan where the protagonist can be part of a dukedom" followed by a discussion of zaibatsu and why they're gone in OTL, and assumed that meant the zaibatsu were taking the place of generic fantasy aristocrats. Which would make sense; "capitalist overlords are like medieval nobles" is a pretty common take.
Yeah haha, although I think it's kind of both the trappings of the otome game need to be served (and also what the author wants to explore). I think if you want to explore how modern day conglomerate families act as effectively nobles you could probably look into chaebols tbh (and if you want prose, there's probably all sorts of KR novels about it). Shit is really crazy if you haven't already looked into it. The "Republic of Samsung" jokes kind of aren't sometimes, haha...
Li'l missy—ma'am?—little madam, you're in the bourgeoisie equivalent of preschool. I don't think there has ever been a social order where it's considered acceptable for three-year-olds to get engaged and normal for young girls to have a say in who they marry.
The latter is extremely irregular, and Ichijou accepting that as an explanation can only be explained by him being in a really bad situation I guess, haha. The former though... marriage is generally not acceptable, engagement to promise ties can happen, IIRC. Runa's likely talking a load of horseshit like I mentioned, though.
I had a "one or two feldspars" moment here. Balance sheets are the most straightforward kind of financial report, of course everyone understands what they represent!
Haha -- I'm by no means an expert, but honestly my brain was so bombarded by trying to put stuff together I was like "man, balance sheets seem pretty simple, do I really need to go into a long explanation..."
Investopedia's generally pretty decent if you want good, basic information (like -- it's by no mean a replacement for a proper education, but I've found it pretty solid for surface trends and general understanding. I am very much not an accountant / economist / finance specialist etc) so I generally link to it in case people want a deeper dive, but I do hope things are still parsable with the text in the update, haha...
...if we accept the assumption that alternate history nonsense stretching back to the Meiji Era and radically redrawing the Cold War map barely affected exchange rates. Which is a pretty absurd assumption that I hope Modern Villainess isn't making.
I do think there's some fudgery and rounding, but checking this old Reuters article things did hit that low for a brief moment in time, as well as this Los Angeles Times article at that actual time. Generally, I think this is sourced to a pretty tough dichotomy that Modern Villainess has struggled balancing -- things have definitely changed to make the "otome game timeline" to exist, but there is, to borrow a turn of phrase, a "canon event": the 2008 financial crisis, which is linked to Runa's downfall in the game, and there is a lot of things linked to that happening, especially in a Japanese with the Lost Decades.
This also makes sense because again, like you said, some general things will probably happen anyways, like the dot-com bubble. And thus, the alternate timeline still accepts that there's a World War II, that Japan got turbofucked, it got heavy US investment to recover and to be a counterweight against China, and thus there probably would continue to be trade frictions before things went tits up. Something something you can also rely on hypercapitalist finance bros to fuck things up with real estate -- IMO, that probably has moved beyond a "canon event" to a "law of the universe," not gonna lie.
That being said, you're also correct that things won't exactly 100% translate over, which is probably why Runa delegates fine details to people who are actually better than her in those sorts of things, and is more of a big picture person knowing what to invest in thanks to future knowledge, and some handwavy villainess chassis or whatever. You're absolutely correct that it would be insane though for things not to change though. For example (thanks to its upcoming relevance), Manchuria's Daqing Oil Field not being in the PRC's hands absolutely shifts developmental and economic tracks for a... metric shitload of reasons, which I can only guess to be one of the reasons for the absolutely insane map I showed in the first update.
So yeah, things definitely can and will change, but other things probably don't just because of how geopolitics can be as well as the constraints of the timeline, i.e. "there is a 2008 financial crash, there is a Japanese lost decade, there needs to have been Two World Wars with a somewhat similar framework (with subtle changes, ofc), etc., and also probably for the sanity of the author, I suppose.
That being said, doing a light google, this one was made in 1937 in Taiwan, which is pretty radically different from I assume the mid-80s Russian / Northern Japanese diaspora + honeypot combo.
Thank you very much to your detailed response, I really appreciate it when people engage so deeply. Sorry for the relative radio silence -- exams have been hell and so have job applications, but I'm currently a thousand words deep on another update. I hope to have it out by sometime next week, but if I'm really lucky I'll have it done before the end of March.
