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Quite a few business leaders look toward both past and future with considerable misgivings. "The costs of all this are going to be horrendous in the 1990s," says Donald Clark, chairman of Household International. "We just overlooked major problems like drugs and our schools." Elmer Johnson, a , former executive vice president of General Motors, says, "The financial wizards of wheeling, dealing and acquisitions brought their bags of tricks, but they turned out to be a lot of hogwash. The main concern should have been, Who's minding the store?" Observes William Weisz, vice chairman of Motorola: "The kind of issues we have are survival issues. The competitive environment is going to get much tougher. Tremendous battles will have to be fought. If we don't succeed, America will just end up as a nation that rents hotel rooms and sells hamburgers to each other."
The imagined enemy in these competitive wars is usually the Japanese. Their GNP is still only third largest in the world, but it is growing much faster than those of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And in certain symbolic things Japan has already become No. 1. In 1980 six of the world's ten biggest banks were American; today eight are Japanese and only one American. In that same decade, the Tokyo stock market passed the New York Stock Exchange in total value. Average Japanese per capita income climbed past the U.S. figure. And then the Japanese bought control of Rockefeller Center, Columbia Pictures Entertainment and much of Waikiki Beach.
Such things fill some Americans with a resentful sense that the Japanese are taking over the country, if not the world. But far bigger investments in the U.S. are those of the Europeans, who now face a gigantic opportunity in the collapse of East European communism. In theory, the European Community is supposed to complete its basic economic merger in 1992, when it will have free movement of capital, open borders, no trade barriers among the member nations and a common tariff on outside goods. Some now see difficulties in the new possibility of German reunification and an economic opening to the East. Leaders of the European Community are convinced, however, that the answer to that possibility is not to delay the Western merger but to speed it up. "Time is short," European Commission President Jacques Delors declared in an address at the College of Europe in Bruges. "History is accelerating, and we must accelerate as well."
That may provide some of the best news of the 1990s. As for the bad news, remember Chicken Little.