| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MARCH 1, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| READERS REPORT
Don't Count Asia out of 'The Atlantic Century' I found your story trumpeting the notion that the U.S. and European Union are ''steadily converging'' a bit odd in light of the disputes between the two giants over bananas, beef, barley, cell phones, aircraft, and films (''The Atlantic Century?'' Cover Story, Feb. 8) This has brought Washington and Brussels to the brink of a trade war. Your readers would have been better served if you had focused on an item that may be more symptomatic of future trends: the mid-January meeting of Asia-Europe finance ministers in Frankfurt, where Malaysian ideas about capital controls were echoed by Germany's leftist Finance Minister, Oskar Lafontaine, and others. The proposal by Japanese Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa that Asian nations should abandon their traditional dollar link and peg their currencies to a basket that includes the yen and the increasingly prominent euro was also greeted with warmth. Since the parliament of Japan, like those of France and Germany, has a complement of Communists, not to mention Socialists, it may be more realistic to speak of a ''convergence'' of Europe and Asia, as against the more conservative nostrums emerging from the U.S. Gerald Horne Chapel Hill, N.C. The photo of Mercedes cars being loaded onto a ship in Hamburg sums up the theme of ''The Atlantic Century?'' Here we see German cars starting a trip, possibly across the Atlantic, on the Nissan Bluebird--when you would expect a ship by that name to be carrying Japanese cars across the Pacific. Tom Johnson Millbrae, Calif. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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