What will they think of next?
Japanese Housewives Sweat in Secret as Markets Reel - New York Times:
"TOKYO, Sept. 15 — Since the credit crisis started shaking the world financial markets this summer, many professional traders have taken big losses. Another, less likely group of investors has, too: middle-class Japanese homemakers who moonlight as amateur currency speculators.
Ms. Itoh is one of them. Ms. Itoh, a homemaker in the central city of Nagoya, did not want her full name used because her husband still does not know. After cleaning the dinner dishes, she would spend her evenings buying and selling British pounds and Australian dollars.
When the turmoil struck the currency markets last month, Ms. Itoh spent a sleepless week as market losses wiped out her holdings. She lost nearly all her family’s $100,000 in savings.
“I wanted to add to our savings, but instead I got in over my head,” Ms. Itoh, 36, said.
...Indeed, online currency trading has become a phenomenon here, with a subculture of blogs, books and investing clubs for Japan’s legions of housewife-traders. The appeal, many of these women say, lies partly in the potential that online trading offered at least some financial independence for wives who still wanted to dutifully spend their days at home.
...The housewife-traders were so secretive that many market analysts did not realize how widespread the trend had become until this summer, when the police arrested a Tokyo housewife accused of failing to pay $1.1 million in taxes on her foreign exchange earnings.
...Still, some analysts point out that the $2.5 billion that Japanese individuals lost last month was just a fraction of a percent of the nation’s overall household savings.
...most of the half dozen homemaker-traders interviewed for this article said they were already trading again, and the rest said they soon would be — including Ms. Itoh, who said she would probably invest her remaining $1,000 in savings.
“There’s no other way to make money so quickly,” she said."
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