The second factor, helping define the mode of recycling, has been the differential in land prices across the Pacific. If land inflation in Los Angeles has radically transformed the economics of local urbanization, it remains yet minuscule compared to the neutron-star densities of property values in Tokyo. In face of the refusal of the ruling Liberal-Democrats to plow Japan’s trade windfalls into higher wages and a Keynesian housing reflation (as demanded by the Socialist opposition), trade-generated surplus capital has instead flooded into stock and real-estate speculations reminiscent of Coolidge’s America. What the Japanese call zaitech, the strategy of using diverse financial technologies to shift cashflow from production to speculation, began to be internationalized in the mid 1980s with a special orientation toward Southern California. In particular, the ‘super-yen’ put the skyscrapers along Downtown’s new Gold Coast at rummage-sale discounts vis-à-vis their most dowdy Tokyo equivalents.