{"id":4411,"date":"2010-10-19T19:08:17","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T23:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4411"},"modified":"2010-10-19T22:29:19","modified_gmt":"2010-10-20T02:29:19","slug":"therisingsettingsun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/10\/19\/therisingsettingsun\/","title":{"rendered":"the land of the  rising<\/strike>  setting sun…<\/font>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened<\/a>
New York Times <\/strong>
By MARTIN FACKLER
The Great Deflation<\/strong><\/div>\n
Coping With Decline: <\/sup>This is the first in a series of articles that will examine the effects on Japanese society of two decades of economic stagnation and declining prices<\/sup><\/em><\/div>\n
October 16, 2010<\/div>\n

OSAKA, Japan — Like many members of Japan<\/span>’s middle class, Masato Y. enjoyed a level of affluence two decades ago that was the envy of the world. Masato, a small-business owner, bought a $500,000 condominium, vacationed in Hawaii and drove a late-model Mercedes. But his living standards slowly crumbled along with Japan’s overall economy. First, he was forced to reduce trips abroad and then eliminate them. Then he traded the Mercedes for a cheaper domestic model. Last year, he sold his condo — for a third of what he paid for it, and for less than what he still owed on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago. “Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage. <\/p>\n

Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West. But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation<\/span>, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy. <\/p>\n

Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future. Even as the Federal Reserve<\/span> chairman, Ben S. Bernanke<\/span>, prepares a fresh round of unconventional measures to stimulate the economy, there are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression<\/span>…<\/p>\n

Just as inflation scarred a generation of Americans, deflation has left a deep imprint on the Japanese, breeding generational tensions and a culture of pessimism, fatalism and reduced expectations. While Japan remains in many ways a prosperous society, it faces an increasingly grim situation, particularly outside the relative economic vibrancy of Tokyo, and its situation provides a possible glimpse into the future for the United States and Europe, should the most dire forecasts come to pass…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
People keep talking about Japan’s Real Estate bubble around 1990 and "the lost decade."I thought after reading this article that I’d just take a look.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In this side by side, the timelines are roughly the same, but the vertical scales are off – Unemployment in Japan is zero to five percent, in the US is zero to twelve and a half percent [the Japaneses are rookies at Unemployment]. They had an Inflation problem about the same time we did and also responded by elevating Interest Rates. Their Real Estate bubble came in 1990 and they never really recovered. The economists [Greenspan, Krugman, Stiglitz, Shiller] all mention Japan when talking about the dangers. And today, Krugman shows us this eerie comparison:<\/div>\n
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Just Call Him Bernanke-sama<\/a>
New York Times
Conscience of a Liberal<\/strong>
by Paul Krugman
10\/18\/2010 <\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Mark Thoma<\/a><\/strong> points us to a paper by Mary Daly<\/a><\/strong> of the San Francisco Fed, which contains this remarkable chart of core inflation in two episodes:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
From Seven Samurai to The Magnificent Seven, this time in economics.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened New York Times By MARTIN FACKLER The Great Deflation Coping With Decline: This is the first in a series of articles that will examine the effects on Japanese society of two decades of economic stagnation and declining prices October 16, 2010 OSAKA, Japan — Like many members of Japan’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}