Will Japan Re-enter Deflation in April 2015?

Reading the most recent statements from Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda or Finance Minister Taro Aso you would get the impression that the days of deflation are now well and truly numbered in Japan. Martin Schulz, economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, goes even further. “Deflation is over in Japan,” he told Bloomberg Television First Up’s Angie Lau . Even Japan’s industrial leaders now believe inflation is here to stay: the country’s inflation rate will be 1.5 percent in the spring of 2015, and 1.7 percent in 2017, according to average forecasts in a Bank of Japan survey conducted in March this year.

But is such optimist justified? According to the Bank of Japan's favored index, which includes energy but not the cost of fresh food, inflation stood at an annual 3.2% in April. Sounds good if what you want to do is generate inflation.

But before getting too excited, it is worth bearing in mind that inflation one month earlier has stood at only 1.3% on the same measure. The difference between months is, naturally, the result of the impact of the 3% sales tax hike which came into force on 1 April. Without that, inflation would have been much lower since the base effect of the 20% yen devaluation is now starting to work its way out of the calculation. Indeed stripping out energy costs (which are the principal knock on cost effect of the devalued yen), inflation in April was but 2.3%, notably below the size of the tax hike. So the question which should be being asked is what will the level of annual inflation be in April 2015, assuming that is there are no further yen devaluations or tax hikes to help push the number back up again? Analysts at Credit Suisse seem pretty clear (see chart below), we’ll be back in deflation again.

Leaving aside the sustainability issue, the type of inflation Japan has been experiencing since the advent of Abenomics – driven by rising energy costs and tax hikes – also constitutes a problem. It has been described by Bloomberg journalists Tsuyoshi Inajima and Brian Swint as the "wrong kind", a way of putting things which highlights the amount of confusion there is out there about just what it is that the BoJ is doing and what it is supposed to be achieving.

To back their point they cite Klaus Baader, chief Asia Pacific economist for Societe Generale in Hong Kong to the effect that “this isn’t the kind of inflation we want in Japan to break the deflation mindset. We’d like inflation that is a reflection of higher wages, whereas this is pure cost inflation that decreases purchasing power.” So now we learn that Japan doesn’t need just any old inflation, it needs a very specific kind, which could be described as “demand pull”, but this brings us straight back to the original problem: domestic demand in Japan just isn’t strong enough to generate this kind of inflation, and nudging up inflation expectations for a couple of years won’t change anything substantial in this regard. Possibly the type of cost push inflation Japan is experiencing is the "wrong kind" for adherents of the Abenomics approach, but it is more than likely the only kind they are going to get. If the structural lack of demand argument I have been advancing is valid, then this means there is permanent downward pressure on costs in an environment of constant oversupply making inflationary wage increases difficult to envision. Indeed, as reported by another group of Bloomberg journalists (Masaki Kondo, Mariko Ishikawa and Yumi Ikeda) , reality itself belies such expectations, since Japan's wage index hit a post 1992 low at the start of 2013. And the downward drift has continued. In April 2014 the average basic salary fell for the 23rd straight month, declining 0.2 percent to 243,989 yen, while average real, or inflation-adjusted, wages decreased 3.1 percent from a year earlier, marking the largest year-on-year fall in more than four years.

Rising inflation and falling wages don’t seem like the sort of combination to make for a sustainable recovery. Indeed it seems so off-mark as to make you wonder whether official sector economists really thought through what they were doing before embarking on this experiment.

The thing is this, given all the doubt which exists about the real roots of Japan's problem, and the fact that it may well be a permanent structural problem and not a temporary liquidity trap one, is it really justified to run such a high risk, all-or-nothing experiment? Even Paul Krugman seems to have changed his assessment various times since the  problem started and while he still fully supports the general approach being taken he now thinks the natural rate of interest may remain permanently negative and that fiscal stimulus might be necessary on a permanent basis (liquidity trap without end, amen).  What makes people nervous is the thought that if the central bank can't deliver on its promise to deliver inflation then a loss of confidence might ensue, and all those dubious risky asset positions might unwind suddenly, just like an earlier set did in 2008.

And there are plenty of people in Japan who have been pointing this out all along. Seki Obata, a Keio University business school professor for example, who in 2013 published a book "Reflation is Dangerous," argues exactly this, that "Abenomics" is exposing Japan to considerable risk without any clear sense of what it can accomplish. Obata also makes the extremely valid point that there is simply no way incomes can rise across the entire economy because the baby boomers are now retiring to be replaced by fewer young workers with post labour reform entry-level wages. Japan's overall consumer spending power will therefore fall, rather than rise as Abe hopes. "Individual companies may offer wage increases, but because of demographics it is simply impossible to increase the total amount that is paid out in wages," says Obata. "On the contrary, that amount will shrink." Simple logic you would have thought, but logic in the face of irrational exuberance scarcely stops people in their tracks.

As far as I can see, all of this  points to one simple and evident conclusion: that Japan needs deep seated cultural changes, especially ones directed to greater female empowerment and more open-ness towards immigration. Hardly matters for central bank initiatives, and indeed ones for which Shinzo Abe, who naturally has given his name to this new economic trend, is singularly ill equipped to carry through. Japan needs a series of structural reforms – like those under discussion around the third arrow – but these would be to soften the blow of workforce and population decline, not an attempt to run away from it. Monetary policy has its limits. As Martin Wolf so aptly put it, "you can't print babies".

The above is an extract from my new "mini book" the A B E of Economics.

The book is available with Amazon as an e-book. It can be found here. You don't need to buy a Kindle to read this book. You can download a free app from Amazon.

The Growing Mess Which Will Be Left Behind By The Abenomics Experiment

According to wikipedia, "overdetermination is a phenomenon whereby a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at once, any one of which alone might be enough to account for ("determine") the effect.That is, there are more causes present than are necessary to generate the effect".  In this strictly technical sense Japan's deflation problem is overdetermined - there are multiple causes at work, any one of which could account for the observed phenomenon. Those who have been following the debate can simply choose their favourite - balance sheet recession, liquidity trap, fertility trap - each one, taken alone, could be sufficient as a cause. The problem this situation presents is simply epistemological - in a scientific environment the conundrum could be resolved by devising the requisite, consensually grounded, tests.

But I would here like to use the term "overdetermination" in another, less technical, sense, since it seems to me Japan's problem set is overdetermined in that we always seem to be facing at least one more problem than we have remedies at hand.

The case of the country's ongoing energy dependency which is producing a growing trade and current account deficit would be a good example. Notionally the problem forms part of the legacy of the tragic tsunami which hit the country in March 2011 and lead to the decision to phase out  nuclear energy capacity.  But now  that decision has been reversed, and starting this summer nuclear generating capacity is once more to be "phased up". The issue is, from a strictly economic point of view would that be good news? Well, it would certainly help with the deteriorating trade balance:

But what about deflation? Would having cheaper domestically produced energy help here? Wasn't generating inflation supposed to be the whole point of the Abenomics exercise? Don't rising energy costs constitute the lions share of the country's recent, much heralded, inflation? Damned if I do, and damned if I don't would seem to be the only conclusion to draw. A win-win policy which both closes the trade deficit and foments inflation (if that's what you think Japan needs) doesn't seem to be on the table. The trade deficit could also be corrected by reducing the fiscal deficit, but that would lower domestic demand, possibly send the economy back towards recession and almost certainly ignite deflation yet one more time.

The remainder of this post can now be found in my Kindle e-book published with Amazon.

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The Real Experiment That Is Being Carried Out In Japan

The future never resembles the past - as we well know. But, generally speaking, our imagination and our knowledge are too weak to tell us what particular changes to expect. We do not know what the future holds. Nevertheless, as living and moving beings, we are forced to act. - John Maynard Keynes

Discussions of the population problem have always had the capacity to stir up public sentiment much more than most other problems. - Gunnar Myrdal

Last Thursday the yen broke through the psychological threshold of 100 to the US dollar. On Friday the slide continued (see chart), even dropping very close to 102 to the USD at one point before strengthening slightly on the run in to the G7 finance ministers meeting.

The ostensible source of the sudden shift was a news release from the Japanese Ministry of Finance detailing the fact that Japanese investors bought a net total of 514 billion yen ($5.2 billion) in foreign bonds during the two weeks to May 3. Speculation had been rife that Japanese money funds would start to respond to continuing yen weakness and low Japanese yields by investing abroad. It is still far from clear that this is really going to happen in the short term, but nonetheless the news was sufficient to spark bets on more yen weakness.

Naturally the fall has drawn comment, especially during the run up to last weekend's G7 meeting. US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told CNBC that while Japan had "growth issues" that needed to be dealt with its attempts to stimulate its economy needed to stay within the bounds of international agreements to avoid competitive devaluations."I'm just going to refer back to the ground rules and the fact that we've made clear that we'll keep an eye on that," he said in a comment that was widely seen as drawing a red line in the sand.

But really, what else do external observers expect? On 4 April Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda announced he was going to increase the money base by 1% of GDP per month for the next two years. That is to say Japan's monetary expansion will be incremental and continuous. Kuroda has even stated he will continue to increase the money base beyond the initial 24 months if the targeted inflation doesn't come. It was always clear that the country was going to have a difficult time trying to generate inflation and that one of the knock-on consequences would be to continually weaken the yen. So you can't realistically expect him to turn round and say now, "sorry, we didn't know it would offend you so,  I'm cancelling the policy". Anyway, that move would throw financial markets straight into turmoil. Didn't they understand what they were signing up to when they accepted "Abenomics" at the last meeting?

Obviously there is still a considerable amount of confusion around about what exactly Japan's problem is, and what the policy is trying to achieve. I have tried to examine the more theoretical background to the problem in my  A-b-e of economics post, but looking through the comments to that piece I realised that I was very tightly focused on one, examining only one aspect of what has come to be known as Abenomics, the inflation targeting component and its theoretical justification. Since ideas about what exactly it is the Japanese government is trying to achieve seem to be many and various, I thought it might be worth coming back and taking a second look at the experiment.

The remainder of this post can now be found in my Kindle e-book published with Amazon.

You don't need to buy a Kindle to read this book. You can download a free app from Amazon.

The A-b-e Of Economics

And the world said "Let Shinzo Abe be", and all was light.

A new craze is sweeping the planet. Known by the title "Abenomics" over the last couple of years it has been steadily gathering adepts in financial markets across the globe. Despite the fact Abe's move fits comfortably within the austerity vs growth policy axis, at the heart of the new approach lies not a strategy to directly create growth per se, but rather one to try to induce inflation. For those who have not been following the Japan saga as it has developed over the last twenty odd years this whole debate may seem like a strange way of thinking about things. After all isn't inflation supposed to be a bad thing, one central banks are supposed to combat? And how can a country possibly become more ever more competitive by force-feeding itself inflation?

Of course, falling prices are not necessarily in-and-of themselves a bad thing - as any old consumer will tell you - since products get cheaper and cheaper with each passing day. So the run of the mill consumer might find life in Japan quite a pleasing and desirable thing, especially if that particular consumer happens to be retired and living on a fixed income derived from savings as indeed many contemporary Japanese actually are. Falling prices only really become a problem in a more general macroeconomic sense if they lead people to postpone consumption, and if this postponement becomes self-perpetuating in a way which leads prices to continually fall, as the combination of constant productivity increases and stagnant demand serve to produce perpetual oversupply. Falling prices also represent a nasty headache for policymakers since while prices go down the value of accumulated debt doesn't, and herein lies the rub. So additional "stimulus" which doesn't lead to increasing nominal GDP simply pushes the sovereign debt even farther along an unsustainable trajectory.

As everyone now recognizes and accepts Japan has a rapidly ageing population and an ageing and contracting workforce. This is the end result of several decades of very low fertility. The number of children in Japan fell to a new low in 2013, while the amount of people over 65 has reached a record high as the population ages and shrinks. This demographic background, which has really been obvious to demographers for years, has only lately come to be regarded as a significant factor in the "Japan problem" by economists. This neglect has most probably been due to the influence of a deep seated predisposition among adherents of neoclassical growth theory to think that population dynamics don't fundamentally influence economic performance in the long run. For many years the Japan phenomenon was simply seen as a classic example of what Richard Koo terms a “balance sheet recession” wherein the need for the private sector to deleverage from excessive indebtedness leads to a form of structural under-consumption.

Perhaps the most important thing which the whole Abenomics episode has brought to light is the urgent need to bring the existing corpus of economic theory somehow up to date with our modern realities. Despite all the talk of policies for "growth, growth, growth" a simple look at the population outlook in OECD countries and especially the potential work force numbers suggests that, at some point or another, economic growth will turn broadly negative. So the real point is there is an experiment being conducted in Japan, but the experiment isn't Abenomics (which I suspect won't work, and could end badly). No, the experiment is about learning to grow old with dignity, not as individuals, but as societies. It is about managing debt in a time of deflation, about giving opportunities to the young, even while the force of the ballot box rides with the old, and about finding ways to ease that rate of work force decline to give some additional room to allow productivity to help, which means both immigration and helping the young - at they are the ones who start families.

The remainder of this post can now be found in my Kindle e-book published with Amazon.

You don't need to buy a Kindle to read this book. You can download a free app from Amazon.