To New York via Tokyo
In the past couple of months there has been a visible rise in the reports expressing fears of an implosion in Japanese, Chinese and Russian economies. The reasons behind these fears are quite diverse. Of course there is nothing new in these reports. Experts have been predicting an implosion in the Japanese economy since the early 1990s’ in the Chinese economy since 2008 and the Russian economy since 1917. Personally, I do not subscribe to any of the theories that forecast implosion in the Japanese, Chinese and Russian economies in the near future. Nonetheless, I believe that the study of the growth, fiscal and indebtedness profile of Japan is important from two viewpoints, i.e., (i) impact on the global economy, should the BoJ losses control over the situation; and more importantly (ii) impact on the global economy if the US economy (consumption, growth, fiscal profile, etc.) follows the Japanese economy and gets trapped in this vicious cycle of high debt and low growth; and the ...