2010/8/31
Atsushi Yamada of AERA’s editorial department, who has written an article with the large headline “An Era of 60 Yen to the Dollar Is Coming” as though to give it pride of place at the beginning of this week’s issue, is truly beyond help.
This man, of all people… was one of the leading figures who began the chorus of righteous indignation, “Why should taxpayers’ hard-earned money be injected into those wicked, unscrupulous banks?” in response to what had inevitably occurred to Kiichi Miyazawa in August 1992… that the only way to resolve the crisis was to inject public funds into financial institutions… something entirely obvious.…
I can still vividly remember thinking, “What an utter fool this man is”…
My regret at having wasted twenty years of my life because of fools like this is beyond words.
It would be fair to call him one of the principal people responsible for bringing about “Japan’s lost twenty years.”
He continues to make arguments steeped in deference to authority; his position can be summed up as a defense of the Bank of Japan.
Set against his argument the opinion of Suguru Niinomi, head of the Economic and Financial News Department, on the front page of today’s Nikkei, “A Sense of Crisis That Is Not Reaching the World,” and the truth should be clear at a glance.
…Anxiety Over “Piecemeal” Measures
“Can Japan afford to keep responding in piecemeal fashion?”
A former senior official of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board who has studied Japan’s financial crisis and deflation in detail expresses concern.
The Fed’s analysis is that postponing the disposal of nonperforming loans and easing monetary policy too late brought about Japan’s “lost twenty years.”
Europe and China, too, have treated Japan as an example of what not to do and have put its experience to use in policymaking.
Yet Japan itself will not learn from its failure.
…Passage omitted…
But Japan is still the world’s third-largest economy.
Hiroshi Watanabe, a former Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs, says that foreign dignitaries he has met recently “are beginning to feel fear rather than irritation at Japan’s present condition.”
…Remainder omitted…
I agree entirely with the conclusion, so please read the front page of this morning’s Nikkei.
What is more, Yamada likens the present competition to weaken currencies to what happened before the war.
Yamada, if you are going to bring up the prewar period, you ought to speak about how the Asahi Shimbun, too, passed along government-supplied information, failed to tell the people the truth, and drove them onto the battlefield with a single conscription notice.
That is what you ought to speak about when you discuss the prewar period.
Even now, you are doing the same thing and shaping public opinion, though you probably do not even realize it.