Wolf Richter: One Part Of Japan’s Abenomics Salvation Is Already A Fail
Japan’s attack in the Currency War was supposed to make it more competitive in international trade – but that, it failed to do. In fact, the opposite occurred.
Read more...Japan’s attack in the Currency War was supposed to make it more competitive in international trade – but that, it failed to do. In fact, the opposite occurred.
Read more...The financial media and investors were waiting tonight for Prime Minister Abe’s latest announcement on the extreme economic sport known as Abenomics. But his new installment dashed hopes, and after a short-lived rally, the Nikkei is down over 3%. But after the wild ride since May 22, when the Japanese index plunged 7.3%, a 3% decline is coming to look almost like normal daily volatility. (Well, now that it’s down nearly 4%, it might be a beast of a different color).
Read more...I welcome readers telling me I’ve missed something, but looking at the Fed’s problem from 50,000 feet, it appears that the the monetary authority appears to have set boundary conditions for its QE exit that it can’t meet.
Read more...By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
This Real News Network video on resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Japan (one of our military protectorates) explains some implications of TPP for health care policy, but also gives a glimpse of how our post-national global elites would like the nature of the State to change. Of course, the TPP negotiations are secret, which cannot but give the impression that TPP’s advantages are not likely to be readily apparent to the citizens who putatively give sovereign states their legitimacy. So, although US discussions have focused mainly on content and intellectual property issues, it would seem that the powers that be have bigger fish to fry.
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Originally posted at Australian Broadcast Corporation’s The Drum
In the long, unending wake of the global financial crisis, desperate governments and central banks are trying their hand at experimental economic policy mixes. Japan and the eurozone offer a glimpse of how radically different anti-crisis experiments can be.
Read more...Whither gold?
Read more...I’ve mentioned repeatedly that Germany wants contradictory things: it wants to stop financing its trade partners (the periphery countries in Europe) and yet wants to continue to run large trade surpluses. I took this to be a sign of German wishful thinking, or just politicians figuring the incoherent strategy can still be maintained for the duration of their time in office.
A post by Yanis Varoufakis show that the Germans at least have better delusions that I realized.
Read more...A good piece in the Nation by Bill Greider, which focuses on Krugman’s long standing support of free trade, and how, contrary to his predictions, the results were not positive for ordinary American workers.
Read more...Yves here. This is an important piece, in that it bucks conventional wisdom about growth and economic development in several ways.
Read more...By Robert H. Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
The current dispute between China and Japan over a few barren islands inhabited by goats – called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese – looks at first sight to be a mere territorial spat. But it has escalated to a very dangerous level in recent months — first words, then actions of police forces, now actions of air forces, and, behind all these, both sides have mobilised all their military, political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural energies to engage in the dispute. It is more fundamental than normal territorial disputes, because the very identities of the two countries are at stake.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil
There’s a lot of talk flying around about the Japanese stimulus. Some appears to be misguided, some appears to be sensible.
Read more...Now some new fodder for the gun-control debate that the horrid events in Connecticut suddenly stirred into a frenzy, though it had been snoozing through the daily drumbeat of murders in Oakland, CA, a few miles across the Bay from me, or in Richmond to the north, or really in any other city. The fodder is inconvenient, however. For both sides of the debate.
Read more...You have to give a fund manager points for admitting to having a “history of contentious posturing.” Hugh You have to give a fund manager points for admitting to having a “history of contentious posturing.” Hugh Hendry’s also a reformed gold bug, which shows an unusual flexibility of thinking (once people join the gold cult, they seldom leave). Even if you don’t necessarily agree, his talk will serve as a useful grist for thought (hat tip Ian Fraser). Hendry discusses the end of an broadly adopted national strategy, mercantilism, and what he sees as the implications.
Read more...Nobody has wanted to heed the lesson of post bubble Japan until way too late.
Read more...Tonight’s Financial Times has a eye-popping story, that the survival of Sharp, one of Japan’s top consumer products manufacturers, is in doubt:
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