Now comes Shinzo Abe. As Noah Smith informs us, he is not anybody’s idea of an economic hero; he’s a nationalist, a denier of World War II atrocities, a man with little obvious interest in economic policy. If he’s defying the orthodoxy, it probably reflects his general contempt for learned opinion rather than a considered embrace of heterodox theory.
But that may not matter. Abe may be ignoring the conventional wisdom on spending, and bullying the Bank of Japan, for all the wrong reasons — but the fact is that he is actually providing fiscal and monetary stimulus at a time when every other advanced-country government is too much in the thrall of the Very Serious People to do something different. And so far the results have been entirely positive: no spike in interest rates, but a sharp fall in the yen, which is a very good thing for Japan.
It will be a bitter irony if a pretty bad guy, with all the wrong motives, ends up doing the right thing economically, while all the good guys fail because they’re too determined to be, well, good guys. But that’s what happened in the 1930s, too …
Is Japan the Country of the Future Again?
by
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/is-japan-the-country-of-the-future-again/
In the broad sense, surely not, if only because of demography: the Japanese combine a low birth rate with a deep cultural aversion to immigration, so the future role of Japan will be severely constrained by a shortage of Japanese.
But something very odd is happening on the short- to medium-term macroeconomic front. For the past three years macro policy all across the advanced world has been dominated by Austerian orthodoxy; even where there haven’t been explicit austerity policies, as in the United States, fear of deficits has led to de facto fiscal tightening, while monetary policy has fallen far short of the kind of dramatic expectation-changing moves theoretical analysis suggests are crucial to getting traction in a liquidity trap.
Now, one country seems to be breaking with the orthodoxy — and it is, surprisingly, Japan:
But, actually, not. Japanese long-term interest rates rose in the spring of 2009 because of hopes of recovery, not fear of bond vigilantes; and when those hopes faded, rates went back down, and are currently well under 1 percent.
Now comes Shinzo Abe. As Noah Smith informs us, he is not anybody’s idea of an economic hero; he’s a nationalist, a denier of World War II atrocities, a man with little obvious interest in economic policy. If he’s defying the orthodoxy, it probably reflects his general contempt for learned opinion rather than a considered embrace of heterodox theory.
But that may not matter. Abe may be ignoring the conventional wisdom on spending, and bullying the Bank of Japan, for all the wrong reasons — but the fact is that he is actually providing fiscal and monetary stimulus at a time when every other advanced-country government is too much in the thrall of the Very Serious People to do something different. And so far the results have been entirely positive: no spike in interest rates, but a sharp fall in the yen, which is a very good thing for Japan.
It will be a bitter irony if a pretty bad guy, with all the wrong motives, ends up doing the right thing economically, while all the good guys fail because they’re too determined to be, well, good guys. But that’s what happened in the 1930s, too …