Abstract
How much more prosperous would Japan now be if it had been under a sound money regime for the past half-century rather than importing unstable US monetary policies? This chapter pursues a counterfactual narrative to Japan’s actual monetary history, formed around a novel depicting of the facts which illustrates the destructiveness of asset inflation. There are seven sub-periods considered—the miracle years which ended in high inflation, Japan on the edge of monetarist experimentation, the great and camouflaged inflation post-Plaza, the depression and rapid recovery which did not take place, the great yen carry trade and false export boom, the Shirakawa resistance to Bernanke-ite monetary inflation, and finally the Abe 2% inflation megillah which no one believes. Final question: how bad will the day of reckoning be for the Abe monetary inflation?
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Brown, B. (2018). Much Ruin in Japan’s Journey to 2%. In: The Case Against 2 Per Cent Inflation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89357-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89357-0_7
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