“We must accept finite disappointment, but must never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
He lifted his country out of the pacifist dogma adopted following World War Two. He contributed massively to Japan’s transformation into a country careful with its geopolitical and strategic interests so it could it take up the seat it deserved at the table of global security operations. He was called a fascist by certain…
Japan is the world’s laboratory. It’s in this country that in 2001, for the very first time, the famous quantitative easing measures were put in place that tried to break the believed-to-be impenetrable barrier of zero interest rates that had been set in 1999. It was a revolutionary endeavour for the time, led by…
On the macroeconomic scale, Japan is a laboratory, but it’s also a cemetery where economists and theorists have had to bury their certainties. I salute the determination of Prime Minister Abe on his departure, having not shied away from any decision or measure in pulling his country out of the lethargy that it has…
The economists and bankers of my generation have had the habit of entertaining themselves by dividing the world into four types of economies: developed, emerging, Argentina and Japan. It is worth, however, updating this somewhat simplistic and caricatural joke by removing Japan from the list of economic aberrations. Albeit highly unlikely, the Japanese property…
It was a mere fifty days that Carlos Ghosn had been detained, starting 19th November 2018, when he was finally allowed to appear – at his request! – before the Court in Tokyo on 8th January 2019, chained to a policeman by the waist and wearing green plastic sandals. Eight weeks had to pass for…
Japan is known as much for its smartphones and robots as it is for the implosion of its real estate mega bubble nearly twenty years before the subprime crisis in the US in 2007, which itself preceded the collapse of the Spanish and Irish real estate markets in 2009. In fact, the Japanese financial and…