This question may seem a strange one, but appears to be worth asking since one US economist after another has been suggesting that, one way or another, the Japanese are simply not trying to find a way of getting out of their mess. First Cecchetti got the ball rolling with the following in the Financial Times:
"What about the zero nominal interest-rate floor, the point at which central banks supposedly become impotent? Listening to officials from the Bank of Japan, you would think that once they set their interest rate target to zero, there was nothing else they could do about stagnant growth and falling prices. Again, I do not believe it."(see my article here)
Then Ben Bernanke added his tuppence-worth:
"The claim that deflation can be ended by sufficiently strong action has no doubt led you to wonder, if that is the case, why has Japan not ended its deflation?.......Japan's deflation problem is real and serious; but, in my view, political constraints, rather than a lack of policy instruments, explain why its deflation has persisted for as long as it has. Thus, I do not view the Japanese experience as evidence against the general conclusion that U.S. policymakers have the tools they need to prevent, and, if necessary, to cure a deflationary recession in the United States."
In fairness Bernanke does not suggest that the Japanese have failed to use monetary easing. But his analysis of what the Fed might do almost all revolves around the use of monetary and exchange rate policy to produce inflationary expectations, thus the claim that all will be well in the US 'since the US has the tools it needs' might be thought to ring somewhat hollow. If the problem in Japan revolves around political constraints, constraints like an unwillingness to bear the weight of the impact of structural reform, then perhaps he might have done better to address the reasons these political constraints will not be operative in the US. Absent this, the assurance that the US will be different seems to imply that there is a mix of monetary and economic policy (short of collapsing their economy completely by closing half of it down) which the Japanese are NOT using. This however seems doubtful.
On the fiscal front what Bernanke terms 'the heavy overhang of government debt' is cited as making ''Japanese policymakers more reluctant to use aggressive fiscal policies". Now this public debt overhang is a product of Japan's ageing population, so are we really to believe that the US might not face similar dilemnas as we get further up this decade? Further, as Paul Krugman has suggested, Japan has not been exactly backward in coming forward with fiscal policy:
"What about the second line of defense, fiscal policy? Japan has tried that, and it has worked -- sort of. Let me explain. .....If you have visited Japan recently you know that it does not look like a country in the midst of a depression. There are strong similarities between Japan in the 1990's and the United States in the 1930's, but there is also a big difference. America descended rapidly into depression. Japan's crisis has unfolded far more gradually........
The other reason that Japan does not look like a country in the midst of a depression is that the government has found a concrete solution to the problem of mass unemployment. By ''concrete,'' I don't mean serious, hardheaded, substantial. I mean concrete, as in roads, dams and bridges. Think of it as the W.P.A. on steroids. Over the past decade Japan has used enormous public works projects as a way to create jobs and pump money into the economy. The statistics are awesome. In 1996 Japan's public works spending, as a share of G.D.P., was more than four times that of the United States. Japan poured as much concrete as we did, though it has a little less than half our population and 4 percent of our land area. One Japanese worker in 10 was employed in the construction industry, far more than in other advanced countries.
Now for the bad news: deficit spending has slowed the Japanese economy's slide, but it has not reversed it. That is, the public works programs provide only temporary, symptomatic economic relief. The favorable effects last only as long as the spending itself. They don't seem to lay the basis for a permanent turnaround.
The Fear Economy
Well, you might think that the case was far from clear. So why don't the Japanese complain at all this unfair coverage of their economic and financial policy. Well, that's just what two of their politicians do in yesterday's Financial Times. Of course their solution is not particularly unconventional: stop China. They begin with a scarcely value sideswipe at the ECB:
Monetary policymakers around the world are still fighting the old enemy of inflation, not the new foe of deflation. There is an urgent need to switch to global reflation in order to avoid a deflationary spiral. In order to cope with economic stagnation, there has been aggressive fiscal expansion since the early 1990s. Several years after the collapse of the bubble, the Bank of Japan belatedly shifted to easy monetary policy. Then it gradually guided the short-term money market rate below the discount rate, but without much success in stopping price deflation, let alone reviving economic activity.
Last year, with the short-term rate virtually at zero, the BoJ abandoned the use of interest rates and shifted to a quantitative easing policy by targeting the current account balances of commercial banks held at the bank. Despite the injection of liquidity into the markets, the BoJ has not stopped price deflation. Its ability to conduct an effective monetary policy has also been hampered by a dysfunctional financial sector. Commercial banks, saddled with large non-performing loans and inadequate capital positions, have been unable or unwilling to extend loans even though they have abundant liquidity.The Japanese experience demonstrates that traditional monetary policy can lose potency in a deflationary environment. Since the nominal rate cannot fall below zero, a central bank can lower real interest rates and so provide monetary stimulus only by drastically changing price expectations.
Source: Financial Times
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One Japanese observer who has some experience of watching how monetary policy evolves as interest rates approximate to zero (ZIRP) is Morgan Stanley's Takehiro Sato. In a post in early November in the Morgan Stanley Global Economic Forum he made the following observation in connection with Greenspan's recent 50bp reduction in the Federal Funds Rate.
The Japanese economy can be viewed as the front runner in a global deflation race with no apparent end. The central banks of other industrialized economies will gradually come to understand the BoJ�s struggle, having completely exhausted traditional policy measures. Central banks fought inflation through the mid-1990s, but the battleground has changed to the uncharted territory of deflation. In some respects, it is positive that overseas policy authorities and academics will begin coming to terms with the tough challenges of fighting deflation in a ZIRP environment, which is something that only Japan has experienced until now. The BoJ should benefit from overseas financial authorities giving serious consideration to the implications of a "purposeless" policy of quantitative easing (basically a zero interest rate with a �15-20 trillion reserve floor) should the FRB and ECB move into the ZIRP realm. The unfavorable scenario for the BoJ would be foreign central banks having unexpected success with quantitative easing and such easing ironically spurring a recovery for the global economy. In this case, the BoJ is likely to face criticism for being slow on the draw with policy action.
Japan�s experience thus far suggests slim chances for the latter scenario. Once the policy rate drops into the lower 1% range, the game is already over for monetary policy. While monetary policy can be effective in restricting total demand when necessary, it lacks the wherewithal for demand creation. Since the elasticity of real money demand from nominal rate fluctuations rises to an extreme level with a zero interest rate, the short-term money market endlessly absorbs liquidity supplied by the central bank, just like spraying water in a desert. Liquidity never makes it to the real economy. This can also be understood in terms of zero opportunity costs for reserve deposits. There is no pain from holding an infinite amount of reserves ("no pain, no gain"). Additionally, the BoJ has gradually raised its liquidity provision mechanism of Rinban operations (which is equivalent to coupon pass). However, these operations wind up strengthening flattening bias on the yield curve, and actually contribute to deflation expectations through the financial market�s expectation formation dynamic. ZIRP poses the danger of getting caught in a policy trap that cannot be easily escaped.
Source: Morgan Stanley Global Economic Forum
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