If only we were all Japanese!
October 29, 2025For the first time in its history, Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock index has smashed through the 50,000-point barrier. In just six months—since April of this year—it has soared by 65%! Some $33 billion has flowed into the Japanese stock market from abroad. After decades of stagnation, the Japanese economy is now roaring. Following directly in…
Perfect storm in the land of tsunamis
June 30, 2025The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is teetering on the edge of a financial abyss. As of March 31, 2025, it holds ¥575.9 trillion (US$3.97 trillion) in Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs), representing 52% of Japan’s total public debt. For years, its massive bond-buying program—part of an ultra-loose monetary policy—flooded the economy with liquidity, keeping yields…
Japanification of China
August 29, 2024Extended periods of deflation, economic stagnation, a declining real estate market, financial pressure and stress impacting households, businesses, and the state. All signals suggesting credible parallels between today’s China and Japan in the 1990s. China risks becoming an aging and heavily indebted country before it becomes a wealthy nation. The Japanese population only…
Shinzo Abe: killed for being a Keynesian
July 10, 2022He 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, mirror of the world
June 29, 2021Japan 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…
Japan: a sleeping beauty
September 1, 2020On 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…
If only we were all Japanese!
December 12, 2019The 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…
What the Ghosn affair tells us about Japan’s judicial system
January 28, 2019It 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…
If only we were all Japanese!
June 17, 2018Japan 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…