Japan's Policy Trap: Dollars, Deflation, and the Crisis of Japanese Finance Book

Until the beginning of the 21st century, the Japanese inspired a kind of puzzled awe. They had pulled themselves together from the ruin of war, built at breakneck speed a formidable array of export champions and emerged as the world's number two economy and largest net creditor nation. And they did so by flouting every rule of economic orthodoxy. Now only the puzzlement remains - at Japan's inability to arrest its economic decline, its festering banking crisis, and the dithering of its policymakers. Why can't the Japanese government find the political will to fix the country's problems? This book offers a provocative analysis of the country's protracted economic stagnation. Japanese insider Akio Mikuni and long-term Japan resident R. Taggart Murphy contend that the country has landed in a policy trap that defies easy solution. The authors, who have together spent decades at the heart of Japanese finance, expose the deep-rooted political arrangements that have distorted Japan's monetary policy in a deflationary direction.Read More