As I often write, in Japan it is far more difficult to hide the failure of “stimulus.” There are varying degrees of visibility in that regard around the QE world, but they all share negative redistribution as the base alloy. That’s why Janet Yellen may be merely uncomfortable and Mario Draghi increasingly brooding, but Haruhiko Kuroda was just pushed to [...]
Maybe after a couple generations the Japanese have finally had enough. Perhaps QQE was large enough so as to leave no doubt that not only did it fail, but that it was the same result registered time and again before. The Bank of Japan has promulgated eleven QE’s dating back to 2001, but this last one might have done so [...]
If the US consumers and attendant “demand” had been relatively weak entering 2015 producing even at that point questionable conditions that are now admitted as a manufacturing recession, it is increasingly clear that “something” changed around the middle of the year. Obviously, market turmoil that had been largely focused overseas suddenly swung internally to capture US markets once though invulnerable, [...]
As China, Japan is the definition of insanity. GDP fell 1.4% in Q4 2015, marking the fifth contraction out of the past nine quarters and yet the word “stimulus” remains attached to QQE, the Bank of Japan and Abenomics in general. At this point, how much more time and sample size is necessary before calling it a failure? In about [...]
When real household spending fell by 4.6% in April 2014 it was cause for concern. That was the first month after the tax hike hit and the decline in spending was much larger than anticipated (by economists, at least). Despite the heavy toll, Bank of Japan officials remained (outwardly) wholly unconcerned over what was believed a minor setback on the [...]
At what point do we accede back to logic and rational thought? The Bank of Japan is “forced”, not my word, to unleash negative nominal interest rates and that is taken as a positive for everyone everywhere. Such a move is, without question, an open admission that QQE failed and failed spectacularly (since it was even expanded not really that [...]
Before World War II, in Japan there were four large conglomerates situated as vertically-integrated family-centered monopolies. Called zaibatsu, they were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, and many other smaller rivals. Each group would not just own companies in all industries, they would also organize and contain an assimilated banking concern (horizontal integration) to carry out capital and funding needs for within [...]
Japan has a history of revising its economic figures all over the place. The QQE era seems to have made GDP accounting something of an art form rather than the quantitatively determined “science” of how it is presented. For example, last December the Japan Times ran a story on December 2, 2014, under the headline Japan’s Recession May Be Shallower [...]
The FOMC at least still knows how to throw a party. It may not be what it once was, but for one day there was the familiar euphoria predicated upon the wish that central bankers might know something about anything. All-too-quickly, however, it vanished as it becomes increasingly clear, despite all attempts to rewrite this history, that there are no [...]
Japan fell back into recession again in Q3, expected this time, which is actually being charitable to Abenomics and especially QQE. To even believe that this monetary insanity has produced even marginal benefits, it has to be given “credit” of at least mini-recoveries in between these “technical recessions.” It is a problem far worse than that, as even a technical [...]
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