Random Dispatches

Tsukiji Fish Market

Jul 12

lindsayrgwattFood, Travel fish, markets View Comments

Every day the Tsukiji fish market processes 15% of all the fish that is eaten in Japan. Tourists can visit, although it’s getting a little tougher. You used to be able to visit the tuna auction (starts at 5 am), although you now need to call ahead for a permit.

Wen and I headed over around 9 am (the market starts at 3am; it’s all over by 11am) to see what it was all about.

The first thing you notice is that when you get off the Tsukiji subway station you can smell fish. It permeates the earth around there and hangs in the humid air all day long. If you don’t like the smell, do not under any circumstances visit the market.

The market itself is ordered chaos. It’s set up as an arc about a central point and all the trucks carrying fish enter/exit through there. It’s got its own traffic cop – and it’s also where you enter; watch out for the trucks.

From there, a series of long warehouses are where the loading and unloading occur. Carts and specialized trucks are used to ferry the fish to and from the actual market:

The market is arranged as a series of aisles along the arc. Each aisle has a store out front and a utility alley behind it to replenish the stocks:

They have been serving up fish here forever. The floors are actually line with cobblestones:

In the market, you can buy any sort of fish or sea creature imaginable:

The size of the fish cuts are incredible. You can also see how some of them were flash frozen mere hours before in a boat out in the Pacific:

Equally interesting is watching the people who work there:

If you go, be sure to check out the market about two blocks away. There’s no hall, rather the streets are just a series of covered shops on the first floor. They sell all sorts of interesting wares and cooked foods:

A Marble In Your Mouth

Mar 26

lindsayrgwattFinance markets, policy Comments Off

When I was a kid my dad used to say that when politicians wanted to lie they spoke “with a marble in their mouth.” (I have yet to hear anyone else use this expression, but it’s stuck with me).
I couldn’t help but remember that today when John Paulson-the hedge fund manager who made billions last year-was in the New York Times saying that no hedge funds had failed in the current economic crisis ans hadn’t really causwd it and therefore shouldn’t be heavily regulated. After all, it’s the greedy bankers and insurers who caused this right?
Let’s check the facts. First, this crisis was accelerated by the failure of Lehman Brothers (that was the day the financial earth broadly stood still). Lehman brothers failed because their was a fall in confidence in it-which drove it’s stock price down and created a vicious cycle that ended in bankruptcy.
Now here’s the dirty little secret: when it failed, their were 38 million naked shorts on it that failed as trades. That means that essentially the entire market bet against it, trying to drive down it’s share price for profit-which of course reinforced it’s ultimate failure (Paul Kedrosky’s blog links to the facts).
So who made these trades? I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t an army of retail investors using eTrade. I’m betting that it was a bunch of hedge funds-which means that they’re now right at Ground Zero of the current debacle.
Of course, I can’t prove this-and that’s the magic. Hedge funds are surrounded by such a thin, slippery skein of regulation that there’s no way to tell. I love free markets but they only work when there’s an open flow of information-and that’s exactly what’s missing here.