This good-natured and highly informative session, more a seminar than a debate, is partly about how much trade we might ideally want, but more about how the Asian economic meltdown affects how much trade those countries can manage. JJJ: "If you

look at the situation 15 years ago, the American industrial system was supposed to be buried by the Japanese, and now the tables are completely reversed, and it all has to do with innovation and change in America. That's why we were able to come back.... I think that Japanese culture has great difficulty making big changes, and that's why I continue to be a little pessimistic that even as you look forward into '99, we may not get a Japanese economy that's strong enough...." PB: "What I would like to see in Japan is them being able to sit down politically and come to grips with the necessity of dealing with bankruptcies, dealing with the real-estate bubble, having to write off difficult loans ... It's interesting--there has been more investment gone into China in the last twenty years than has gone into Japan in the last forty years."