Economic indicator

The Japanese company Kongo Gumi closed its doors at the end of 2006, the victim of having borrowed too much money in the 1990s for the country's real estate boom. Kongo Gumi had been under continuous ownership of the same family since the year 578, according to Business Week. For over 1,400 of those years, Kongo Gumi had stuck to its signature business of building Buddhist temples, and failed only when it branched out into the unfamiliar field of real estate.