The present and future of Sony

[NJ5]

kitler53 said:
excellent post NJ5...i was going to make the exact same one except you did a much better job than i would have.  with that said...i had a very specific question i wanted to lead up to...

NJ5 said:

...

1- A recovery of the Western currencies during next year.
2- A successful downsizing/restructuring which allows them to become profitable even with lower consumer purchases.

...

sony basically got f*@#'ed by the strong yen and sony really needs that to change back in their favor.

1. why the hell did the yen suddenly get so strong?  okay, yeah, it is to do with the economic crisis and all but what are the specific contributing factors.  it's not like japan is doing any better than the rest of the world right now so why is their currency suddenly be so strong?

2. what "perfect storm" of events need to occur for the yen to return to its normal value?

I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on the economy, but as far as I know it's not so much the yen getting strong, it's more the Euro and dollar getting weaker (taking associated currencies along with them).

American and European governments are printing a lot of money to bailout banks and whatnot, and this makes the currencies less valuable. When there's more of something, it always becomes less valuable.

From what I'm reading, I don't expect the dollar to get stronger, I haven't seen so much analysis on the Euro but it's probably not going to fare much better. There's still a lot of crap waiting to happen, with credit card debt appearing to be one of the next things to explode.