An obvious result of growing financial integration is that control over the Los Angeles economy is being alienated, with incalculable consequences, to power centers six thousand miles away. The Downtown ‘renaissance’, after all, is only a perverse monument to US losses in the global trade war. When the Japanese economy seemed invincible and its supply of exportable capital infinite, this deficitary dialectic did not trouble local elites. But 1980s blind faith in the ‘Pacific Century’ began to buckle at the knees following the kamikaze dive of the Tokyo stock market in early 1990. Los Angeles’s leaders were rudely awoken for the first time to the real nature of colonial subservience upon the inscrutable workings of a Japanese economy bloated with fictional capital. For example, when the Bank of Japan recently decided to raise its discount rate, it drove Tokyo investors to desert Disney Corporation stocks en masse for domestic bonds. The result was unexpected distress and confusion in Burbank. This was an infinitesimal foretaste of what a general real-estate slump in Tokyo or a Japan-centered recession might do to those sectors of the Los Angeles economy – like Downtown or Hollywood – hopelessly addicted to ever-increasing fixes of recycled debt.