Japan's Policy Trap : Dollars, Deflation, and the Crisis of Japanese Finance - gebrauchtes Buch

Until quite recently, 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 it by flouting every rule of economic orthodoxy. Today, however, only the puzzlement remains - at Japan's inability to arrest its economic decline, for 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 volume aims to answer why. The authors contend that the country has landed in a policy trap that defies easy solution. Deep-rooted political arrangements preclude the "obvious" measures urged on the country by so many observers. At the heart of Japan's dilemma, paradoxically, lies the most visible symbol of the country's economic success: its enormous, dollar-denominated trade surpluses. These huge accumulated surpluses have long exercised a growing and perverse influence on monetary policy, forcing Japan's authorities to support a build-up of deflationary dollars.