'Stalling Markets': The Last Time This Happened Was October 1929

'Stalling Markets': The Last Time This Happened Was October 1929

Fri, 07/19/2019

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Great article from GoldMoney, focusing on the US and the mercantilist policies of the Trump administration.
It is unfortunate that China is not included in the broad picture as the Chinese economy is also slowing down fast with a highly leveraged financial system.
"History does not repeat, it rhymes!"
October 1929 it may not be but there can be little doubts that we are approaching a new paradigm.

The combination of American trade protectionism and the end of a failing credit expansion is leading into a global economic downturn, and potentially a systemic crisis. Meanwhile, investors still believe more extreme monetary policies will stabilise economies and that the ultra-low interest rate environment will persist without renewed price inflation. As Samuel Johnson reputedly said of a second marriage, it represents the triumph of hope over experience.

Introduction

There is a moment just after the top of every credit cycle where positive momentum stalls before a new reality emerges. When the stall begins, as appears to be the case today, everything is still read positively. Perennial bulls say “Don’t worry, the central bank will reduce interest rates and inject enough money into the banking system to ensure any recession will be minor and growth will resume”. With interest rates falling, confidence in the final outcome means stocks continue to rise. With this mindset, bad news for the economy is always good news for stocks.

This investors’ paradise is populated by devotees of the new economics, supporting progressively increased state intervention. They don’t actually believe that free markets should set stock prices anymore and have become hooked on central banks pursuing inflationary policies. In their minds, the relationship between monetary inflation and rising stock prices amounts to a financial equivalent of perpetual motion. However, their enduring belief in the might of central banks and the importance they place on maintaining asset prices makes inflationists blind to the message from stalling markets.

We all get caught up in it. And when evidence of the stall in economic growth mounts, we clamour for lower interest rates, credit expansion, and finally competitive exchange rates. Even President Trump is now telling us the Fed must weaken the dollar to boost exports and the American economy. As it is already doing his bidding with interest rates, surely the Fed will oblige.

The naivety of this reasoning is endemic, and as a naïve supporter of free markets, President Trump is beginning to trot it out again. In Britain, the same old inflationist story, wrapped up in proposed tax cuts to be paid for later by economic growth, is now being pushed by Boris Johnson, almost certain to be the next Prime Minister. Let us hope this is just electioneering rhetoric. But so widely are the myths of monetary stimulus believed that they are now certain to be renewed in a push to sustain economic growth.

That gold prices measured in dollars will be guaranteed to rise is indirectly becoming officially sanctioned. Those of us in the gold business would be grateful for President Trump’s endorsement of gold if it was not for the economic consequences of his weak dollar policies on ordinary people whose money is about to be trashed. Nevertheless, the gold price has now jumped to a new level and markets are trying to discount the consequences of what is now unfolding. As the gold price continues to rise, those who wonder whether it is worth buying miss the point. It is not gold that rises, but their money that’s falling. Money is falling because governments through more aggressive monetary policies are about to deliberately undermine their own currencies.

The naivety over the consequences of weak money is not restricted to the leaderships of the US and UK. The maintenance of negative interest rates and bond yields in the EU and Japan are already testament to that. But we now see two world leaders (assuming Boris succeeds May) who indicate they are aware of the failings of the economic establishment, but publicly endorsing the inflationism that has been central to the establishment’s failure. By promising the tax jam of today for a better outlook tomorrow, Boris Johnson is roughly where Trump was before he was elected president. Let’s hope an enterprising journalist asks him to clarify whether he thinks a lower sterling (which we already have) is good for the economy. Very likely, he will agree, perhaps with the proviso that price inflation remains under control.

Therefore, central banks are committed to address stalling economic growth by snorting more of the drug that is giving us the downer. But our leaders and central bankers are ignorant of sound theories of money and credit and are driven almost entirely by statistical information. And here we hit a further problem. Government statistics are not fit for purpose.

Statistics are misleading

Statistically, inflation is under control, because the statisticians with their methods have ensured it is so. In giving the central banks a passport to accelerate the rate of monetary inflation by suppressing the consequences, they are storing up trouble for us all. There will come a time when not even the manipulation of consumer price statistics will hide the fact that the purchasing powers of the dollar, sterling, euro and even the yen are all falling at an alarming rate. It is when we begin to sense that this is a problem that the stalling feeling turns our greed, or complacency, into concern and then outright fear.

Exactly two hundred years ago, Lord Canning, who was briefly prime minster of Great Britain, warned that you can prove anything with statistics, except the truth. This was over a century before modern econometrics evolved to make statistics more meaningful. But statisticians have missed what was behind Canning’s point: statistics prove nothing because they cannot replace sound reasoning. Instead, they only assume the relationships between cause and effect. Rather than attempting to understand the manner of the link, their approach is to monitor the relationship between monetary inflation and changes in prices, to ensure that increases in the CPI remain within a target range. As long as this is the case, monetary policy makers can carry on issuing money out of thin air.

You cannot measure the general level of prices, because it is a concept and not a fact. Strictly speaking, it is hardly a concept either, because it is not the unmeasurable general level of prices that inflates, but the purchasing power of the currency that diminishes. It may take time to work through, but if you increase the quantity of unbacked state money and the bank credit in circulation, a unit of currency will simply buy less.

Not enough recognition is given to the draining effect on the productive members of society and their businesses. Monetary inflation undermines the value of their earnings and profits, transferring wealth from savers, and it impoverishes the poorest labourers for the benefit of government finances.

Far from obtaining something for nothing, the government gets its seigniorage by impoverishing the same people that pay its taxes. If one could measure the general level of prices, it is more likely that they have been rising by between seven and ten per cent annually for a considerable time, as illustrated by John Williams’s ShadowStats, and confirmed by the Chapwood Index. The official two per cent target is poppycock. If we assume the two independent calculations are more realistic, US citizens have been getting collectively poorer every year since the financial crisis of 2008/09. Not only is this evidence that Canning’s aphorism about statistics telling us everything but the truth still holds, but governments now fully depend on the concealment of the true state of affairs by statistical suppression.

Governments have arrived at this point because funding through inflation faces the law of diminishing returns. The more a government inflates, the more it impoverishes its people. And the more the people are impoverished, the less both taxes and inflationary financing yield. And as we look down from the heights of inflated asset prices, the more evidence emerges that our economies are stalling, the more important this will become.

With the establishment, investing institutions and regular investors all being misled by official statistics, it is no wonder that an understanding of the true position hardly exists. It is an Alice-in-Wonderland world where the more you inflate, the more GDP statistics say the economy is growing. Under-recording the price deflator has become central to maintaining the delusion. Almost no one realises that an increase in nominal GDP is no more than a reflection of more money and credit being injected into the economy. It confuses this increase in the quantity of money and credit with progress. But progress suffers the disadvantage, like the general price level, of being impossible to measure with statistics.

Reliance on statistical method has encouraged wrongheaded government intervention. Long ago, we dismissed the certain knowledge that society thrives by cooperation and governments only by intervention. The former progresses, the latter interferes. It prevented governments from trying to improve on free markets, but that ended following the First World War. Consequently, decades of intervention from the 1920s onwards have increasingly distorted our world away from free-markets to embrace the Gospel of Government. The gospel has been a drip-feed upon which modern economies have become increasingly dependent.

Stalling into a nose-dive

That drip-feed is now augmented by American trade protectionism, reversing the expansion of trade from which we have all benefited. The harmful effect on the American economy will become apparent. The combination of a long period of credit expansion and trade tariffs will very likely drive it into a deepening recession, possibly a slump, as these conditions today repeat those of 1929-1932.

If the inflationary effect on prices is to be limited, it will require foreign investors to buy dollars and increasing quantities of US Treasury debt to cover an escalating budget deficit. Global funds will have to be diverted to the dollar from other investment opportunities, notably the widescale development of Asia. From its policy towards China’s economic development, elements of the American deep state appear to understand this. President Trump appears not to. And now, he proposes to weaken the dollar the foreigners are expected to buy to finance his escalating budget deficits.

It is a difficult trap he has unwittingly set for his administration. And as the US economy stalls further, and the dollar weakens in a vain attempt by policy-makers under The Donald’s cosh to make America great again, the dollar’s slide will require rising interest rates for its purchasing power to be stabilised, forcing US Treasury prices into a bear market. The US Treasury’s finances will be plainly ensnared in a debt trap.

Other currencies, driven for decades by the same Keynesian logic, are to greater and lesser extents in the same boat. But every currency has two driving forces that determine their valuations. There is the collective assessment of the foreign exchanges, and changes in preferences between holding money and buying goods in the domestic economy. Sometimes, the foreigners might feel a fall is overdone, and buy a currency when its domestic purchasing power is still falling. At other times, the slide towards oblivion is deferred by the general public who cannot get their heads round what is happening to their government’s money. But despite these interacting forces, once the world’s reserve currency begins to decline, interest rates everywhere have to rise.

If this increasingly likely event happens, the effect on forward-looking markets is certain to be brutal. Today’s stall becomes a free-fall tomorrow. That is why it is likely that by the end of this year it will be increasingly apparent that national economies, emasculated by continual wealth-transfer through monetary debasement and over-burdened by non-productive debt, will begin to rhyme with the crash of 1929-32 and the subsequent depression. The most notable difference is that with today’s currencies being unbacked fiat instead of tied to gold, prices will rise instead of falling as they did in the 1930s.

Implications for gold

The last time the destructive forces of an end-of-credit-cycle coincided with trade protectionism was in October 1929. They were the driving factors behind the Wall Street crash and the subsequent depression. This time, the tariffs are not nearly as high as those of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, but the magnitude of the credit cycle is far greater. While we can hope that this time the combination is not as disruptive as the 1929-32 episode, there is no doubt that today there is enough of a build-up of market distortions ready to wash out of the global economy to justify considerable unease.

This unease is yet to be manifest in widespread investment opinion, which still hopes for a miracle from monetary policies. But both our analysis and the empirical observations of events ninety years ago demonstrate why a miracle is impossible. A slump in global business activity is already developing, and the only policy response will be inflationary. Monetary expansion is effectively guaranteed in a vain attempt to stop a downturn and to ensure the banking system is preserved. This compares with a 25% contraction in broad money between 1929 and 1933 as thousands of American banks went under.

Through the medium of the dollar, in 1929-33 prices were measured in gold, which was fixed at $20.67 to the ounce. This time, there is no sheet anchor, and the dollar will simply lose purchasing power. This means there will be more dollars to the ounce of gold. There is no point in speculating how many dollars there will be to the ounce; you might as well debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. More importantly, it is difficult to see how the slide in the dollar’s purchasing power can be stopped once it starts.

Just as the ability of the productive sector to pay taxes is being increasingly undermined at the same time as the government’s expenditure rises, we can also see time preferences adding a further layer of destruction to government finances. Foreigners in particular will need far higher interest rates to stop them selling dollars and to persuade them to buy again. This was the policy of Paul Volcker, as Chairman of the Fed addressed in the early eighties, when he increased interest rates to 20%. Federal government debt then stood at only 30% of GDP, while today it stands at 105%. Putting aside the bad debts escalating at the banks from a grossly overindebted private sector, a rise in interest rates sufficient to stabilise the fiat dollar would almost certainly wipe out government finances and therefor faith in the dollar itself.

That is the extent the debt trap has now reached, and the problem is not confined to America. All major economies are in the same boat with very few notable exceptions. The Eurozone includes governments with severe debt problems, and the Japanese government has the highest debt to GDP ratio of them all. Lesser currencies have always had difficulties, which will simply escalate if dollar interest rates rise.

For the moment, very few see the true extent of the fiat currency problem. It is hard for them to visualise an economic slump when overall demand for goods drops, and for their prices to rise at the same time. They are fixated on the objective value of money in transactions, and do not realise that if people lose faith in it, a currency’s purchasing power will slide.

When it starts, the process could be rapid. The education of the masses in this matter, thanks to cryptocurrencies, is more advanced now than it has ever been. If bitcoin soars to $20,000, $50,000 and more, millennials round the world will understand that the dollar, or their local currency, is going down. The rush out of fiat bank deposits into crypto on its own could easily precipitate a widespread currency and systemic crisis.

This is not to advocate buying bitcoin, or gold for that matter. It is just to warn of the approaching end of the road for unbacked fiat currencies at a time when governments themselves face bankruptcy.

There is a well-known saying, that governments can’t go bust. Don’t you believe it: it depends on fools continuing to place value in their fiat currencies. We can begin to see that end in sight.

Should you know your Line score?

Two years ago, when the social credit system was introduced in China, it was obvious that the idea was too good not to spread outside the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom and so it has even faster than anticipated.

As expected the idea to be more presentable has been stripped of its most nefarious aspects of “social control” but the basic concept is the same: To introduce a score which is easily exchangeable between companies and gives a reliable mix of social and economic information on people for marketing, commercial and financial purposes.

Outside the US where Credit Bureaus like Equifax and Experian have build credit scores covering the credit worthiness of most of the population, other countries have limited themselves in this field mostly due to privacy concerns, especially in Europe and Japan.

But the need to segment efficiently and target more readily the right people has not only been growing but becoming more and more indispensable.

Who needs segmentation?

As we explained already in previous posts, segmenting your own client database is complex and expensive and segmenting non clients is close to impossible for most companies due to the lack of reliable and relevant information. And still, it needs to be done if only because not doing it exposes you to the risk of not offering the right incentive to the right people when your better informed competitors skim out the best segments of the population with tailored services. Whatever we may thing of targeting, it is a arm race which no company can ignore and expect to stay in business.  

But to segment people, you need data, lot’s of data which is obviously not available to most companies which have access to little more than what’s on their client list: Names, addresses and a list of transaction.

Enters the Internet platform companies with their huge database and free services. These database being gigantic, the probability to strike gold with the right tools is clear. On the other hand their “free” but actually extremely expensive services raise the incentive to do “something” with data. Facebook and Google, the two giants in the sector have focused themselves on cornering the on-line advertising ecosystem, offering targeted advertising to companies. The system works and is efficient, but you mostly do not know who you are targeting beyond the specifications of the segments you are creating in a black box system which is proactive but blind. This is the accepted practice of the Internet which mostly protects the privacy of everyone while offering better segmentation that what advertising agency could ever offer. The online advertising market being huge and growing very fast,  both Google and Facebook have little incentive to go much beyond what they currently do with the risk of increasing still further the negative attention they are attracting.

But other, smaller players, such as Line, face a very different and less attractive ballgame. Line is a free service offering unlimited communication (similar to WhatsApp) with a few commercial applications but very little space available for advertising on its mostly mobile platform. So the question to mine efficiently the huge pool of communication they had access to was from the beginning hanging in the air and waiting to be answered. Creating a credit score is the smart answer.

It is interesting in this respect to note that people accept that on-line platforms such as Google, Facebook or Line can analyze as much as they want their written communication but that voice companies such as ATT or NTT are not allowed to do the same with voice contents. A difference of content or perception?

What is the Line score?

First of all, let’s note that Line Score is a product of Line Credit Corporation which itself is a joint venture between Line, Mizuho Bank and Orico (Oriental Corporation). This underlines the important financial aspect of this new service.

Secondly, the service is of course voluntary and will be based on building relations with thousands of partner companies which will offer access and incentives to people, powering the system and helping build a critical mass of early adopters.

Unlike its Chinese counterpart, this Japanese system is not a “social score” and certainly has no intentions of becoming a political score. But here the problem is that once you have created a basic score and it becomes freely available which is the goal, it becomes extremely easy to tweak it to create a derivative which offers whatever characteristics you want… And this clearly is the risk of such a system. Once it exists, it is extremely easy to create whatever version you want.

Likewise, the system has not been gamified as in China to make it more acceptable. .  yet. This of course is only a matter of time. If adoption is too slow, it is obvious that someone, somewhere will add some addictive “game-like” aspects to it. Points, gifts, levels and other ideas are all over the Internet to be chosen from, to make the system more addictive and ubiquitous.

Finally, let’s not forget that this score is before anything a financial score, so its primary goal will be to target Consumer finance, a large and growing market in Japan. 

So to resume: A great idea, a powerful market need, available data and technology means that we all will get used to seeing scores on our mobile phones sooner than later. It is likely, at least at the beginning that these scores will proliferate. Then the market will settle and select the best ones. Meanwhile, China will be 2 or 3 years ahead, fine tuning and refining the technology (without controversy? I am not so sure but let’s see.)

Eventually, I believe these scores will soon become the core of a multitude of such indexes and synthetic numbers used in an infinite variety of functions to allow, disallow, give access, privileges in an infinity of fields; transportation, information, finance, leisure and more. The transformation from data to information and into insight will be completed and another level of complexity will arise.

Such technology is both to be feared and welcome. It all depends what we do with it. It can both be a tool for increased efficiency or enhanced coercion. In the end it is likely to be both as so many other technologies which came before. What we measure and how we implement it will be important to put it on the right tracks. A system by default as so often happens with technology is not likely to give us the best possible outcome. Unlike what Adam Smith believed, the invisible hand of the market has often proved to favor vested interest and its actions to be neither light nor optimum.    

 

For reference, I include below the information provided by Line to present the product in its press report.

[Japan] LINE Launches Proprietary Scoring Service LINE Score to “Enrich Daily Life”

2019.06.27 ALL

● Users can enjoy car and fashion-related benefits, with travel, food, and home décor benefits to follow

● Users consent will always be required before calculating scores or sharing data with partner companies

TOKYO – June 27, 2019 – LINE Corporation (“LINE”) announces that its proprietary scoring service LINE Score will be available today through LINE Credit Corporation (“LINE Credit”).*1 LINE Credit itself is a group company of LINE Financial Corporation (“LINE Financial”), provider of LINE’s financial services.

*1 LINE Credit is a joint venture established between LINE Financial, Mizuho Bank Ltd. (“Mizuho”) and Orient Corporation (“Orico”).

Utilizing a proprietary AI-driven scoring model, LINE Score is available to the LINE app’s more than 80 million MAU in Japan, and is easily accessed via the in-app LINE Wallet tab. The service will provide promotions, deals, and a range of other benefits customized to each individual user’s score.

Specifically, calculating the overall score involves utilizing data from a user’s activity trends on the LINE platform (such as usage of the LINE app and other LINE Family services) along with additional information from the preliminary questionnaire, and a combination of AI capabilities and Mizuho and Orico’s sophisticated know-how. With the launch of LINE Score, LINE has been able to establish a proprietary scoring platform suited to online financial services.

Additionally, a user’s score will only be calculated after they have given their consent.

Background to LINE Score and plans for the future 

With the widespread use of the internet and smartphones, various activities in people’s day-to-day lives are rapidly shifting to the online world. The age of full-scale big data has arrived. Countless businesses are analyzing and utilizing online data to further optimize their services to suit individual interests and preferences, evolving them into better, more useful offerings. Novel and innovative mechanisms and systems also continue to emerge.

In addition to the LINE messaging service, LINE offers its over 80 million MAU in Japan a wide range of content, services, and businesses in areas such as AI, O2O, and Fintech. Providing these services has enabled LINE to accumulate a vast amount of big data on a daily basis, leading to its growth as one of the largest big data companies in Japan. 

With LINE Score, the proprietary scoring method works by combining big data collected from the LINE platform, and a dozen items of profile information provided by the user in the preliminary questionnaire. Based on this score, users can enjoy more personalized and convenient benefits and experiences, as well as obtain more value from LINE services and its various partners to “enrich their daily life.” 

LINE’s huge userbase has made it possible for the company to deliver a more accurately calculated, more tailor-made experience. To offer benefits to even more users in the future, LINE intends to increase the number of partnerships with other companies and services, and expand the value and value-added experiences it offers. 

In future, LINE is contemplating applying scoring data to other LINE services to provide an even more convenient and useful system for users. Further, the company is also considering providing scoring data to third parties through API for agreed upon uses, while always respecting user consent and strictly safeguarding personal information.   

Going forward, LINE will continue to develop LINE Score into an exceptionally convenient service—striving to securely use and manage data, and provide experiences that will make users’ day-to-day life just a little richer.

Features of LINE Score 

1. AI-driven proprietary scoring model

LINE’s proprietary scoring model utilizes (i) data on a user’s activity trends on LINE services and (ii) the additional information provided in the preliminary questionnaire to produce a score between 100 and 1,000 points. Users can check their own scores at any time.

2. User consent is always required

Users will be asked to provide their consent before using the LINE Score service. Scoring data and information provided by the user when first using the service will be utilized to calculate scores in future, and for the purposes outlined in LINE Credit’s privacy policy. This data will never be shared with LINE’s partner companies (providers of benefits) without user consent. LINE places protection of user privacy as its highest management priority, and follows a much broader interpretation of personal information than the legal definition. As the company is also especially stringent when it comes to protecting “privacy of communications” (such as messages), the content of communications and messages are not included among data used to calculate scores.

3. Benefits based on scores

Special deals, promotions, and a host of other benefits are available to users, with each set of benefits tailored to the individual user’s score. For example, various campaigns held during different periods will offer special deals for sharing and subscription services, including space sharing (such as parking spots and venues), items (such as clothes and accessories), transport (such as cars and bicycles), and skill sharing (such as housekeeping services).

This summer in Japan, LINE also plans to add to lineup of benefits with a new unsecured personal loan service, LINE Pocket Money. Under the new service, annual interest rates and credit limits most suitable for an individual user will be determined by their score from the LINE Score service. In the lead-up to the launch, LINE intends to develop a service model that is a go-to option for unplanned expenses, and make it possible to complete the entire process—application, borrowing, and lastly, repayments—on the LINE app. More details will be announced when LINE Pocket Money is released.

About LINE Score 

LINE Score is a service that allows users to enjoy special deals, receive gifts, and other benefits that are tailored to their scores. Getting started with the service is straightforward—users simply open the LINE app, go to the LINE Wallet tab, tap on LINE Score and agree to the Terms and Conditions. Scores will increase if the user answers around a dozen preliminary questions, and will also regularly update as more data is acquired on the user’s activity trends within the LINE services. 

Calculating scores with the service

Users must consent to the LINE Score Terms and Conditions before they begin using the service. Data will not be calculated by default, or be utilized under a user’s current LINE account settings. Additionally, each time a user makes use of a benefit offered by a partner company, they will need to consent to having their data shared with the company in question.

 

Partnering with a diverse range of companies to offer user benefits

To celebrate the launch of LINE Score, users who use the service and obtain a score will be able to participate in the following campaigns.

• Campaign launches today: Invitation to the August 23 premiere screening in Japan of the upcoming anime film, Ni no Kuni distributed by Warner Bros (all users are eligible regardless of their score).

• Campaign launches in July: Rent Italian luxury cars for free

• Campaign launches in July: Rent designer French bags for free

• Campaign launches in August: Rent Swiss luxury wristwatches for free

More details on the campaigns and promotional periods can be found in the following blog post. 

http://linescore-blog.line.me/

Starting today, the following companies will offer an array of special deals, promotions, and other benefits to users via LINE Score.

From today to July

• DeNA SOMPO Mobility Co. Ltd.: JPY 5,000 coupon for new users (from today)

• Laxus Technologies Inc.: JPY 3,000 worth of Laxus Points (from today)

• LINE Pay Corporation: Level up in My Level incentive program for users with a score over a certain number (from today)

• Airbnb: JPY 2,000 coupon (from July)

Coming soon

• Oisix Ra Daichi Inc.: 60% discount for Oisix package of assorted foods

• Orient Corporation: Benefits for new Orico members and additional 1,000 Orico Points 

• Clover Lab. Inc: 20% off first month (up to JPY 3,960)

• Komehyo Co. Ltd.: Users can enjoy a JPY 1,000 discount when making a purchase worth JPY 5,000 or more, and receive an additional JPY 1,000 when selling item(s) totaling JPY 5,000 or more.

• Stripe International Inc.: New members can rent one additional item for free for first month

• Subsclife Inc.: JPY 5,000 coupon for the first month fee

• DMM.com LLC: JPY 1,000 for DMM’s Iroiro Rental service

• LIFULL Co. Ltd: LIFULL Interior coupon worth JPY 2,000

LINE is currently recruiting new companies interested in partnering to provide benefits for LINE Score users. More information can be found at the LINE Partners page below.

https://partners.line.me/ja/partner/join

*Company names are listed in Japanese phonetic order.

*The campaigns listed above may change.

About LINE Corporation

Company name: LINE Corporation

Head office: JR Shinjuku Miraina Tower 23F, 4-1-6 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo

Representative: Takeshi Idezawa, Representative Director

Business: Provision and operation of the LINE messaging app and content and services provided on the LINE platform, other web service businesses and AI businesses

Capital: JPY 96.199 billion (as of March 30, 2019)

Established: September 4, 2000 (trade name changed from NHN Japan Corporation on April 1, 2013)

About LINE Credit Corporation (as of June 2019)

Company name: LINE Credit Corporation

Head office: Osaki Garden Tower 22F, 1-1-1 Nishi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo

Representative: Mikihiko Yoshinaga, Representative Director

Business: Provision and operation of scoring services, and development of loan services

Capital and capital reserve: JPY 5 billion 

Shareholding ratio: LINE Financial Corporation: 51%, Mizuho Bank Ltd.: 34%, Orient Corporation: 15%

Established: May 1, 2018

Who am I kidding? (Weekend cartoon)