In some sense this sort of article confuses me. This is a different economy, with its own legislative framework and where the people speak a language that is not English. But the frame is that they are basically a clone of the US and a policy change in Japan is equivalent to the policy change that sounds the most similar in the US. And even in English speaking countries, the frame that interest rates are like a little knob that the central planning committee adjusts is suspect. How the rate is influenced is quite important too.
There is so much context required to interpret this, it really needs to be part of a "Japan Economy" wiki rather than a stand alone article.
But best of luck to Japan. Nobody ever asks for my opinion, but IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate. The evidence that markets are weak at setting interest rates is itself quite flimsy.
> IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The interest rate policy is linked to the money creation/destruction process, which is ultimately a centralised state function. Banks create/destroy the money, but the pace at which they can do so is governed by interest rates.
I don't understand how the market would be able to set that rate. You'd need multiple entities acting as "central banks", and somehow competing?
I'd prefer to see a policy where either the schedule for monetary creation was publicised several years in advance, or where a constant amount of money in the economy was targeted rather than a specific interest rate (I'd go with the former, it seems harder to game). We've actually got exactly that in Bitcoin which is making it an interesting experiment for me, although it is too cumbersome to act as money we'll get to see how that sort of system performs in a market.
The idea that it is proper to adjust the rate of monetary creation based on the market is suspect. It can't create wealth, it can create confusion and is looks suspiciously like a distortion that results in asset owners becoming wealthy at the expense of someone else. Asset prices appear to inflate more in line with the M2 - somewhat faster than the CPI, suggesting that asset owners are getting more benefits from this policy than anyone else. I don't see why they need an extra boost given that they already own productive assets.
Basically; at the moment the system is designed to penalise anyone who tries to preserve wealth in actual cash and as collateral damage prices keep eternally climbing. Neither of those things is helpful and if anything it just makes it harder for people to make rational decisions. It is confusing policy with no theoretical upside that has been drawn to my attention.
You need more money when there is potential for more economic activity. Think about money as centralised IOUs. If 10 farmers want to borrow to buy seeds and fertilizer you need 10 units. If 100 farmers want to do it you need 100 units. Same with the rest economy. You just need some institution which assumes the risk the IOUs are not paid back (cause that would destabilize the system). Those institutions are banks. Limiting amount of money in circulation is just limiting economic activity for no reason and allows rent seeking behaviour of sitting on top of money pile selling to the highest desperate bidder.
And yes, system is such that it penalise anyone who tries to preserve wealth in actual cash and that is for very good reason! If you want to preserve wealth - it's easy just buy wealth (stocks, real estate, land). If you want preserving wealth without exposure to asset class fluctuations then you want insurance and in any rational market insurance costs you money. Keeping cash is safe and it costs you - exactly as it should be.
The problem with that is that it creates an incentive to hoard real estate for the purpose of wealth preservation, which can have major detrimental effects. Even using stocks for this purpose may cause or exacerbate problems, such as asset bubbles.
Why is it preferable for people to hoard land than money? Land is a tangible and productive asset; if I had to choose between the two, I'd rather that it be efficiently allocated than that money were. Only those people who desperately need land, in order to make productive use of it, should have any financial incentive to own it.
One of the difficulties with this is the question of how you tax an asset whose value you don't necessarily know for certain, because real estate is not fungible and its market price is only really known when that specific parcel is changing hands between unaffiliated parties. Perhaps you could apply the tax as a lien, set as a percentage of an unknown value, and deferred until it is next sold, and have the government take back ownership of the land if that percentage reaches 100%. But even this might only encourage people to trade land between agents at suppressed prices, just to pay off the tax, and then flip it at its "real" price shortly thereafter.
Every local government in America has basically figured out how to value real estate for taxation, although it's not perfect - I think that loans against a property should be limited to it's tax value as a first step, and ultimately land-value rather than improvement value should be taxed based on who else is trying to purchase the land.
> For real estates, but not for other assets classes. Unless you tax the ownership of every asset.
Other assets are (supposedly) productive - investing in companies lets them do research, pay employees, etc, investing in property improvement (as opposed to land) gives more people nicer homes.
> That begs the question, is even more regulation really the best solution?
Even more than what? These regulations would improve things. Which particular regulation do you feel is harmful?
To summarize the thread so far, we need to create more money in circulation in order allow for more economy activity, and penalize preserving wealth in the form of capital.
Allegedly, "if you want to preserve wealth - it's easy just buy wealth (stocks, real estate, land)."
In other words, this is intentional to push people towards preserving wealth in the form of assets. But this creates issues where assets become over-valued - and some assets (real estate and land) are necessary to survive.
Your proposal is to tax the ownership of assets (i.e. the preservation of wealth) in order to ... push people back towards capital (i.e. for the preservation of wealth)?
The point is to push people towards productive assets - investments in people building things - and to generally limit wealth preservation. Unlimited wealth preservation = dynasties, which is not a goal.
Inflation is a sort of (not very effective) flat wealth tax. But inflation is necessary because in a deflationary system the best investment is holding cash, which makes everything freeze up.
Wealth should be (minimally, progressively) taxed, mainly to prevent serious distortions when someone has $1B in the bank and most have $10K.
Taxes, regulations, and subsidies on assets needed to survive (shelter, utilities, food, medicine) are necessary to keep these items available to everyone, because the market tends to break down in these situations.
You've phrased it well, especially because taxes are (to first order) deflationary, as the negative of government spending; tax revenue is effectively taken out of circulation and deleted from the economy, while government spending is (effectively) money that is printed anew.
Japan has had three decades of deflation. So it does seem that when cash holds its value, people don't need to speculate on real estate. In the '80s, when it had high inflation, it grew a real estate bubble well beyond the 2008 US bubble (despite plenty of construction). China has rampant overconstruction and a plummeting birth rate, and yet it has built a real estate bubble perhaps even beyond '80s Japan, because its population saw real estate as a safe place to store and grow their wealth.
At least prior to the pandemic, that price growth can be almost entirely attributed to the Abenomics policy of a rising sales tax (which went from 5 to 8 percent in 2014, and then to 10% in 2019). This was deliberately implemented to cause consumer price inflation and accelerate consumption (due to the expectation that prices would rise in the future). Consumption tax is included in the CPI. If you look at base prices before sales tax, they're almost perfectly flat between 2010 and 2020. Anyway, the CPI is flat enough over the decades that the Japanese yen has largely held its value, at least on domestic products, and this supports the thesis that Japanese citizens haven't felt it necessary to accumulate real estate to protect their wealth.
As an aside, the fact that the purchasing power of the US dollar has fallen substantially over that time, while the exchange rate of JPY to USD has risen, is something quite fascinating to me. I don't see it discussed nearly enough.
> CPI is flat enough over the decades that the Japanese yen has largely held its value, at least on domestic products
Not contesting—this makes sense—but do you have a source?
> the fact that the purchasing power of the US dollar has fallen substantially over that time, while the exchange rate of JPY to USD has risen, is something quite fascinating to me. I don't see it discussed nearly enough
It’s the widowmaker carry trade. FX traders and macro funds love talking about it.
It comes down to the difference in international versus domestic demand for dollars per se, not dollars in any form (e.g. Treasuries).
The widowmaker carry trade reflects the currency side, but what fascinates me is that for example, a tube of toothpaste (random example) has gone to $3~$4 in the US, while it's still $1 in Japan. Go to a dollar store in Japan (except for Daiso) and it's full of cheap, high-quality goods that are made-in-Japan, from plastic organizers and pencil cases to measuring tapes and bicycle stickers. Those are now cheaper than similar made-in-China products being sold in the USA. The cost of container shipping is still quite low. So you'd think Americans would be hungrily importing Japanese goods until the arbitrage opportunity disappeared, but they're just... not. And perhaps that reflects that the most significant and long-lasting component of inflation in the US is shelter, which can't be imported.
To be fair, bubble Japan had ridiculous property bubble valuations. At the peak, the grounds of the Imperial Palace had a valuation more than the entire state of California.
What about inflation indexed bonds? As far as I can see you can't lose money with those, and they don't cost anything (even earn a bit, after adjusting for inflation).
Well, bitcoin shows you exactly what to expect in such a situation: it makes a terrible currency that nobody ever wants to spend.
I know many people are convinced that the value of money comes from its scarcity, but it's actually a very limited view: An even more important characteristic of money is that it must be abundant enough. That's why humanity spent most of history using gold and silver as support for value and not diamond and platinum.
That's the neat part with credit-based money: it's generally produced in just the amount you need for the economy. But another problem arise in case of financial crisis: banks can run out of liquidity if other banks refuse to lend them, and it has a catastrophic effect. That's what central banks are made for: they are lenders of last resort.
The problems you are referring to aren't really related to monetary policy itself, but about fiscal policy: when you try solving all problems (namely aggregate demand being too low) with monetary policy alone, you end up in weird places.
> Well, bitcoin shows you exactly what to expect in such a situation: it makes a terrible currency that nobody ever wants to spend.
Long before bitcoin, Gresham's Law already said that, given the choice between spending soft money and hard, people will spend the soft and hold the hard.
> Gresham’s law doesn’t apply to bitcoin because it isn’t legal tender
Gresham’s law applies to anything used as money. Which I would still argue does not apply to Bitcoin, as it’s transitioned into a store of value versus functional currency.
Gresham’s law is really about currencies where coins have a ‘true value’ and a ‘nominal value’. Like, a silver coin has value as silver, and compared to a nickel coin with the same face value, it’s a ‘better’ coin, so people won’t spend it.
It’s not obvious how to apply Gresham to a conversation about dollars and bitcoins. Legal tender parity would be one way to make the law apply.
> Gresham’s law is really about currencies where coins have a ‘true value’ and a ‘nominal value’
Correct. Or, more classically, a nominal value and commodity value. Whether it’s legal tender isn’t functionally germane (though historically, it is).
> not obvious how to apply Gresham to a conversation about dollars and bitcoins
Bitcoins have a sloped demand curve. Liquidating ten billion U.S. dollars gives you ten billion dollars. Liquidating the same in Treasuries gives you almost ten billion dollars. Liquidating the same in Bitcoin yields an unknown amount—the commodity value of a basket of Bitcoin that size. The gap between the quoted “value” and that true value of a given aggregate creates a localised Gresham effect.
Talking about currencies and banks, a core aspect is that debt is also a form of currency that be created and destroyed. The biggest issue in modern financial crises is not that banks run out of liquidity, but rather that the trust of existing debt can crash to the point of making people believe that the bank can no longer recover enough of it. A central bank can then act as last resort and buy the debt or repaying debt, restoring trust.
> The biggest issue in modern financial crises is not that banks run out of liquidity, but rather that the trust of existing debt can crash to the point of making people believe that the bank can no longer recover enough of it.
This is exactly what we mean when talking about banks running out of liquidity though.
The financial crisis from 2007-2008 would not have been prevented if banks had more liquidity. Debt insurance help, but that just moves the problem to the insurer.
Subprime mortgages, toxic assets, and excessive risk-taking is about trust and risk. When the government becomes the debt insurance, then that risk get managed through stricter banking regulations. Liquidity do not make a bad debt less bad. At best it can hide the problem as the bank tanks the loss, but that only works as long the bank is profitable.
An other interesting example was the Icelandic financial crisis, where the Sovereign debt defaulted on loans from UK and Netherlands. This caused diplomatic problems, including threats of cutting of the Icelandic banks from the global banking network. The value of the Icelandic currency sharply dropped in relation to other currencies, and the Central Bank of Iceland became unable to act as a lender of last resort. The solution in the end was a international bailout support program, including securing more debt from other nations to pay existing debt. This renewed trust in the sovereign debt, but also the trust in the currency and the government.
The biggest problems in modern finance are not about banks running out of liquidity. It hasn’t been since the Great Depression. The recurring problem has been non-banks being bank-like.
It is the biggest problem, until Central Banks intervene and solve the problem altogether, which makes the problem functionally disappear, but it's still the key problem. That's true for any company btw: you can live practically forever insolvent as long as you are liquid, but no matter how solvent you are “liquidity kills you quick”.
> The Fed and FDIC are separate. Central banks help with the liquidity problem. Deposit insurance solves it.
It seems you are somehow conflating “liquidity issues” with “what happens with customer's bank account”, as if bank runs were the only kind of liquidity issue that could happen to a bank, and then arguing that this isn't the case. But that's not my point in the first place!
Commercial banks need to borrow (central bank) money every once in a while to meet their liquidity needs, there doesn't need to be a bank run for that to happen, and if at that time nobody wants to lend, they are dead. Fortunately they can get the liquidity they need from the central bank directly at the discount rate, and we don't have a financial crisis every other year like what happened just before the Fed was created.
> there doesn't need to be a bank run for that to happen, and if at that time nobody wants to lend, they are dead
Yes. This is what we have been discussing. This is solved.
What you describe happened a year ago. If the bank isn’t insolvent—if it’s just a liquidity issue—that is a solved problem with deposit insurance in America. We fold it, put it into receivership, everyone keeps banking, next day is stressful for accountants. Even without the central bank’s involvement.
It isn't a terrible currency because of the fixed supply pattern though; it is too volatile because there isn't a consensus on how to price it yet. At some point it'll be more like gold where the value of crypto is obvious and understood. And I think the major problem is it is too risky, a fat-finger mistake can deplete an entire wallet with technically no recourse.
Gold is also a terrible currency in today's world, that's why it has been abandoned by everyone during the last century.
Of course bitcoin is broken in many additional ways, but the economics doesn't make sense in the first place. (And it was created and promoted by people who were confident that the Fed's intervention in 2008 was going to trigger hyperinflation, what happened in the following decade should give you a pointer how economically literate these people are).
I believed that for a long time but I have come around that to the idea that it makes sense to have physical gold like a secondary savings account. I now understand how gold can be personally useful during normal economic times.
> Gold is also a terrible currency in today's world, that's why it has been abandoned by everyone during the last century.
Open to question how bad though; there isn't really such a thing as a good currency. If the argument is that the US dollar is the best we have it is a bit of a disaster; it can't even be used to compare values over a 12 month span, the inflation is significant. And as I recall the abandoning done in the US was because because Nixon said the US government wasn't winning the game and flipped the table as opposed to any fair process, vote or even market consensus that gold was a bad idea.
I'd agree if the argument was to anchor currency value to an energy commodity to preserve some sort of $/Joule energy measure. That'd be really helpful for using money to track value. I'm still not sure why people are so unhappy at the idea of using money to track some constant amount of value.
The point of a currency is not to experience zero inflation, it is to facilitate commerce as a medium of exchange. If you want to save, buy appreciating assets.
> I'm still not sure why people are so unhappy at the idea of using money to track some constant amount of value.
What's the grand cosmic purpose of having something that holds a "constant amount of value" (whatever that means)?
> What's the grand cosmic purpose of having something that holds a "constant amount of value" (whatever that means)?
Well, if a sandwich shop was selling sandwiches for $10 last year and $11 this year, it'd be convenient for me to have a way of telling if the real price of a sandwich has gone up without needing to do any calculations and look up statistical data. I think most people would benefit from that sort of comparative power to be honest; it is difficult to keep track of whether the offers being made are better or worse value as time passes. If the value of money were constant, then a $11 sandwich in 2024 would be guaranteed more expensive than a $10 sandwich in 2023.
I've talked to several people who are convinced the economy would collapse if that sort of constant pricing was normal practice. I have reservations about their claims.
But what purpose does the "constant value object" serve here? To evaluate if the real sandwich price has changed you need information about the sandwich (and the rest of the economy)...
Seems like the easy way to get close to a 0-inflation policy. How would you get close to a situation where the price going from $10 to $11 indicated that the real price of a sandwich had risen?
If it is possible to target 2% inflation and 3% inflation, then it is possible to target 0%. We're not dealing with particularly complex ideas here.
And if we anchored the unit of measurement to some commodity - which appears to have been standard practice for most of human history, I might add - then we'd be able to get a pretty good estimate of relative real changes in prices. It'd be more accurate than the current system of targeting constant price changes.
It wouldn't be perfect, but the current policy is basically printing money and handing it out to asset owners - which is not only imperfect but wildly unfair, distorts markets in unhelpful ways and looks a lot like it is heading for a large financial collapse.
> If it is possible to target 2% inflation and 3% inflation, then it is possible to target 0%
Look at the variance about 2%. Except now you risk depression. Which means when you get it a little wrong, you get people and companies defaulting on loans and mass lay-offs.
> if we anchored the unit of measurement to some commodity - which appears to have been standard practice for most of human history
The theory for why this is a bad idea was written in the 19th century and practice the 20th. Also, if you’re concerned about the rich getting richer, deflationary and anti-growth commodity money is the opposite of what you want.
Does any of this this theory come with a reference? Because as arguments go that is so information-lite I'm not even what theory you are invoking.
I'm not worried about the rich getting richer. I'm worried about market distortions and unfairness. I think everyone should be getting richer; the rich included.
> Which means when you get it a little wrong, you get people and companies defaulting on loans and mass lay-offs.
So, not much change from the current state? We have a big financial crisis about once a decade, usually accompanied by mass layoffs and bankruptcies.
Besides, defaulting on loans and layoffs isn't when the damage is done. The damage is done when bad loans are made and people are hired for jobs that aren't actually value-creating. You're complaint here is that we would be detecting and recognising real economic damage - that is something we should be doing. If people make bad loans they shouldn't get to pretend they made good ones, and people should be redeployed from low-value jobs to high-value jobs. There is no point making people do bullshit work.
> Does any of this this theory come with a reference?
You’ve been provided with several in these threads. A good start might be Mankiw’s Money & Banking. It’s a standard introductory text and addresses many of the common misconceptions you’ve brought up.
Whoops, I mixed up Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics and Cline (or Cechetti’s) Money, Banking and Financial Markets.
The 19th century source is Bagehot. But that won’t make sense without the above fundamentals. (Bernanke’s work on the Great Depression is also a good empirical study on deflation. But again, not worth tackling until after one of the Money & Bankings.)
> it'd be convenient for me to have a way of telling if the real price of a sandwich has gone up without needing to do any calculations and look up statistical data
This is the core problem of economics. If we solve it, we solve, well, the economy. Nobody would need to buy anything; we could just produce and send everyone what we know they want. No need to consider unpredictable variations in individual choice and discretion.
Of course when you include that pesky individualism, this model breaks down. Because it becomes impossible to structure production today to perfectly meet demand tomorrow. Making currency transformations across eons breaks down because it doesn’t make sense to ask how many talents of silver Caesar would have paid for an iPhone.
> talked to several people who are convinced the economy would collapse if that sort of constant pricing was normal practice
No? Are you confusing what you described—which is the aim of price-level targeting—with fixed-price policy?
> No? Are you confusing what you described—which is the aim of price-level targeting—with fixed-price policy?
There are people who seem to literally believe that without inflation people will refuse to invest in anything and choose to return to a cave-dwelling existence. I don't know how prevalent they are, but they turn up in these sort of threads.
> There are people who seem to literally believe that without inflation people will refuse to invest in anything
No. The problem comes without increase of the money supply. If there isn't enough growth to support the growth of the economy, then yes you're definitely hurting it (and if the supply is fixed, then your economy is going to be practically deadlocked).
The nice thing with commodity currency in the preindustrial era is that they accumulate roughly like the overall capital accumulation and productivity so it kind of works (it's not optimal though, and the massive increase of supply from the “new world” and the adoption of credit-based paper money triggered a period of higher growth that eventually led to the industrial revolution).
There's debate on inflation itself, but the economic consensus is in favor of price stability and that's what central bank are targeting. The reason why they are targeting 2% and not 0% is something you can learn from any book or economic resource on the internet, but there's nothing we can do against the fact that you somehow decided never to document yourself on the subject…
Your stance of “I've no idea how the works works or why it works this way and I won't try, but it definitely suck and doing this instead would be better” doesn't make you look good, you know?
> people who seem to literally believe that without inflation people will refuse to invest in anything and choose to return to a cave-dwelling existence
Yeah, I’ve seen them. They’re wrong. The point is price levelling is computationally expensive. It can never come for free. If your economy is dynamic—let alone growing—prices will slip. From time to time, they will do so in a generalised form.
I actually think policymakers’ aversion to deflation comes from its intractability. Lots of societies have collapsed before they could solve deflation. Our examples of inflationary shitshows is partly due to their resilience—a deflating society starves fast.
> Lots of societies have collapsed before they could solve deflation.
Are there? What were these societies?
If I go to the deflation page on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation) the preponderance of examples are places that are actually pretty nice to live and as far as I can see have uniformly not collapsed.
I looked him [0] up. They were trying deflation because they'd tried inflation in the 1920s and that, spectacularly, didn't work. The issue at the time seems to have been that old favourite; the Treaty of Versailles. Germany at the time was under what was described as a "Carthaginian peace" by Keynes who took the opinion that it was trying to destroy Germany's economy.
Given that the German economy then failed; I don't think that is necessarily a reasonable example of failed internal policy. It would be reasonable to interpret it as a society burdened with too many debts to foreign powers with no way to recover.
It's fascinating to see how closed minded you are and how it makes you read everything in the way that fit your preconceptions. Feel free to live with your confirmation bias, but then do not wonder why the world seems to be going backward around you ;).
Do you have a second example of deflationary collapse? I don't think the collapse of the Wiemar Republic is a great example. Maybe if we crop off 1 outlier we'll find something we can agree on.
Possibly not of course, I do suspect that the problem is bad debts and the deflation is the last straw before things go bad. There are some well established links between debt and sudden collapses and I tend to blame the debts.
Because when the world blows up, people need someone to step in and get the system going again. If they don't it will take forever to get the economy going again.
See the GFC as an example. The US economy was about to implode, but the govt stepped in and said, heck no, not on my watch and fixed it. Instead of taking many many decades to right itself, we did it in 1 and the US govt made a nice profit to boot.
A counter point is Japan, they chose not to fix their capital markets and it's 30+yrs later and they finally are getting back on track.
Why on earth would you expect something literally called "currency" to have any longitudinal attribute in time? Currency is meant to be used immediately. That's it's entire value proposition, as the lubricant of trade. If your time horizon is longer, you shouldn't be holding your assets in currency.
I'm going to stop here because of Brandolini's law. But I'd recommend you to read non-Austrian stuff on money.
At this point it's pretty clear that you have very strong opinions on stuff you have very shallow familiarity with, and the only way to fix that is to actually try understanding how the system works.
> Basically; at the moment the system is designed to penalise anyone who tries to preserve wealth in actual cash and as collateral damage prices keep eternally climbing.
That is a feature of the current monetary system. Excessive inflation is bad, but reasonable inflation is a design goal. Cash isn't meant to be hoarded, its meant to be spent and invested. How would you encourage investment in a non-inflationary currency? Thats the problem with bitcoin, people want to hodl but not spend.
> How would you encourage investment in a non-inflationary currency?
Returns on actually profitable investments would be the motivation. Turn the question around for a minute. Do we want an economy that forces people to make unprofitable investments simply to hedge against inflation? Do we want people to have to gamble or lose their assets?
There’s a tradeoff between risk and return. It’s not a binary tradeoff where you either have no risk but no return, or good return but unreasonable risk. It’s a gradient.
I would say it's heterogeneous, not a gradient, but I understand your point. However, my point is that inflationary monetary policy precludes cash savings forcing currency owners to take on additional risk to mitigate inflationary losses. Like the parent post points out, it incentivizes investment. If your currency is inflating at 5% per year, it becomes rational to buy an asset which depreciates at 4% per year. More generally, individuals and Society have to perpetually Gamble on growth in order to stay ahead of inflation.
That's a fair point, things are relatively stable in the US compared to a lot of places. However, it does preclude labor and savings as a path to Financial Security. Your options become Gamble or die poor. If you want to start a family and own a home in midlife, you have to participate in a national pump and dump cycle and come out on top.
> However, it does preclude labor and savings as a path to Financial Security.
Correct. This is an unfortunate fact that most try to sweep under the rug, but when it comes to weighing capital vs labor - the system is exactly what it says on the tin: "Capitalism."
Capitalism is a broad category with multiple variations. I would argue that Central Bank manipulation of inflation, and the related phenomenon of debt financed government are not Central requirements of capitalism.
In some ways, they are even in conflict with many of the more Market driven philosophies.
The problem with bitcoin is that transaction fees completely disqualify it for everyday life (i don't know right now, but probably around $5 for a transaction). I think that problem dwarfs deflationary nature of the currency.
> a policy where either the schedule for monetary creation was publicised several years in advance
This is like mandating a city’s thermostat ratings—in degrees on the dial, not temperature—be set months in advance. The source of the variation isn’t the thermostat. It’s the weather.
> idea that it is proper to adjust the rate of monetary creation based on the market is suspect
It’s possibly the most empirically supported finding in macroeconomics. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of populists or anarchy providing counterexamples.
> the system is designed to penalise anyone who tries to preserve wealth in actual cash
Yes, we separated the transactional (deposits) and store-of-value (Treasuries) functions of the U.S. dollar decades ago. Storing value in cash is literally using money wrong.
> It’s possibly the most empirically supported finding in macroeconomics.
... he asserts confidently while providing literally no examples or counterexamples. Or explaining the analogy - I don't adjust my thermostat very often, I know the temperature that I like, so setting it years in advance is feasible although weird. And governments mandating thermostat settings is a value-destructive idea - much like governments mandating that people use a specific currency (the argument there seems to be that it is necessary for the tax system to function, which is fair, but the mandate isn't value-creating).
> Yes, we separated the transactional (deposits) and store-of-value (Treasuries) functions of the U.S. dollar decades ago. Storing value in cash is literally using money wrong.
"We've implemented this policy on purpose" isn't a valid argument. A year or so ago Sri Lanka implemented a ban on fertiliser. They then had a food crisis because the policy worked as designed. The argument should be "here are the pros, here is the argument/evidence that the pros outweigh the cons". Deliberately doing something stupid just makes it more stupid.
The problem is that there IS competition between central banks. If one country did this, the countries that game'd their currencies would have an advantage.
You cannot sensibly target M2 directly. You can target M0, but not M2. The interest rate is an indirect control on M2.
(This actually also applies in bitcoin! It's just that because bitcoin credit markets are extremely poorly developed the M2 is both much closer to the M0 and much harder to measure. There are also several completely uncontrolled dollar-flavoured tokens circulating on exchanges such as Tether.)
Why can't you control M2? Because issuance of credit is decentralized.
The hard money people would like to split out deposit-keeping (which would inevitably have to charge, not pay interest) and lending out (which would have to be limited to the amount of equity available, as it is to e.g. VC funds). This would make business credit, consumer credit, and mortgages much more expensive.
> designed to penalise anyone who tries to preserve wealth in actual cash
These people are a tiny minority of outliers and trying to force up the cost of credit, on which the real economy runs, to benefit them is pointless.
I think the original comment might be getting at the cultural differences between the US and Japan.
It is plausible to me that the group that owns the most Japanese Yen get to set the rate. That group can decide to tread water or start to charging outsiders for use of the capital.
Warning the above is wild speculation from a stranger on the internet.
"IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate."
We tried that and it was completely untenable. During the 1700s and 1800s more and more of society switched from the non-monetary economy to the monetary economy, and more people went out and got jobs for money, and at the same time economic growth became entirely dependent on debt, so that by the late 1800s the Western nations were witnessing wild swings, where the economy would grow 15% one year and then crash into a 10% depression the next year, then grow 14% a year for two years and then have another major depression. The instability was leading to revolution in many countries. In the end, the government had to step in and regulate the speed at which new debt could be issued, so as to smooth out the business cycle. Britain did this first. In the USA the idea of a central bank was much contested during the 1800s but finally it was made official in the early 1900s.
The central bank is merely a very large market participant. People are welcome to not pay Bank of Japan 0.1% to look after their money (because that's what negative interest rates are) if they want.
The economy functions the same way in Japan in the same way that computers function the same way in Japan, just with a different input method and currency symbol (円).
Unlike computers, the economy isn't deterministic (among other differences.)
In order to understand the Japanese economy today, one really needs to read books about Japan's bubble in the 1980s. The interest rates Japan experiences today are the result of this. In a way, that makes certain aspects their economy very different from that of any other major Western or Asian country.
I would recommend reading "The Bubble Economy" -- which was published in 1992 and thus gives a more closer point of view. The author believed there was an imminent and abrupt price correction, it turn out to be worse and drawn out over decades.
Secondly, "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation", published in 2000. The part about Japan's bubble was more concise than the "The Bubble Economy" and has some bits the first missed.
One of the best things about both of these books is they were written before the subsequent dot com bubble and housing bubble in the US.
Japan provides a good lesson on just how drawn out recovering from gross misallocations of capital during bubbles can be, even in very wealthy and developed countries. In Japan's case, it has had a multi-generational impact which continues today.
The particular conditions which lead to Japanese "stagflation" are complicated and somewhat beyond me (and, seemingly, Japanese policymakers), but the basic operation of trying to cut interest rates to raise inflation and raise interest rates to cut inflation is something that should work across all normal-looking market economies. It did take a long time to take effect in Japan, probably because the model would require negative rates and works less well in that region.
> In order to understand the Japanese economy today, one really needs to read books about Japan's bubble in the 1980s. The interest rates Japan experiences today are the result of this.
Have they really not changed their thinking in all that time?
We in the west have had at 3-4 major financial crashes in the intervening period - and innumerable changes in government policy.
> but IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate. The evidence that markets are weak at setting interest rates is itself quite flimsy.
But that's what's happening (at least with the Fed, it's difference for ECB): the federal funds rate is actually a market rate! What the Fed does is that it sets two other rates that act as a ceiling (the discount rate) and a floor (the deposit rate) for the Federal funds rate. And then the Fed decides a target rate for the Federal funds market, that fits with their inflation target. If you remove the Fed out of the equation (just for this aspect of their intervention), the the Federal funds rate will move freely but then you have no guarantees that you'd have decent level of inflation…
> the frame that interest rates are like a little knob that the central planning committee adjusts is suspect … IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate
Are you suggesting there’s no correlation between market set interest rates and central bank rates?
> IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate.
Actually, markets do set most of the interest rates. The central bank only sets one (to be technically correct several) specific interest rate. Usually, this rate sets the price for short-term refinancing operations of private banks with the central banks. Obviously, other interest rates are influenced by this rate indirectly.
I guess the reason for this approach is that banks can react flexibly to high demand for central bank money (aka cash). For example, if people want to hold more cash suddenly, the central bank will swap cash with good assets from commercial banks (aka printing money) so that they can hand it out to them. With a fixed money supply, interest rates would skyrocket in this case. Just because I want to have more cash rather than see that number on my checking account doesn't make a difference economically and so it should also not influence the interest rate.
The value of the collaterals of the loans in all functioning currencies is much greater than the value of the physical cash.
Thus if you hold the cash, you can attempt a corner in order to obtain a large fraction of the collateral: you hold the cash so that people can't get it and default on their loans. Thus you obtain a large fraction of the collateral, something of enormous value.
What central banks do when you try to do this is that they start printing money, thus this scheme can be stopped. If there's no central bank to do this, the self-interested cash holders could potentially coordinate something like this.
I think the cause of yield curve inversion can be something of this sort, because it can mean that people expect a crash and want cash on hand to buy assets once it has happened, so they don't want to lock their money up for six months, even if the yield is quite high.
Japan is not a mystical fantasy land where the implementation of fiscal policies is radically different. And interest rates are set by the central bank, it's literally a knob where a central planning can influence the economy.
Japan is a bit of a unicorn amongst central banks and has historically relied on a range of unorthodox policy at its central bank. There was window guidance in the bubble era, there was the invention of QE and negative interest rates, and during the 2020s the Bank of Japan became the largest shareholder in the Nikkei.
Japan has done a lot of innovative things trying to claw itself out of the post bubble hole.
We could let the market set interest rates but they would be much higher. Banks would be very unhappy since they have loaded up on the rock bottom rates. You'd see many banks go under similar to SV bank. This is a world economy and they are all somewhat aligned on their interest rate policies. Those that don't fall in line will see a currency repricing (and some like Japan want that to some extent).
What they did, lowering rates to fight a deflationary environment with low growth, is the exact same strategy that the US has used for many years (and Europe as well). The difference is that the situation was much more severe, which made them actually resort to negative rates.
Now that worldwide inflationary pressure is much higher, you're seeing rates rise everywhere. Of course, rates are different from country to country, but directionally, there's nothing novel about what's happening here.
You're saying you can't generalize, but on the contrary, there's a very obvious generalization here.
> where the people speak a language that is not English
How would that be relevant...?
> they are basically a clone of the US
I don't necessarily see this frame in the article. If you mean that it cites "american" indicators, it's because those are pretty generic economic indicators shared by pretty much any capitalist economy. Are they the full picture? Certainly not (their infamous public debt, just to mention one, is not mentioned), but mentioning them doesn't imply that they are "basically a clone of the US".
> it really needs to be part of a "Japan Economy" wiki
I mean, each and every country needs its wiki, but life is short.
> IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate
I'm not sure what you mean - leaving banks free to set interest rates? Nobody in the world does this currently. Or just having an independent central bank? The BOJ is more or less as independent from government as the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank (at least formally).
Economic policy isn't math though, is about what a rational decision maker would do. We can model some parts of that using mathematics, but large parts are hooked up to the local legal framework. Take US student loans for example - the market doesn't make any sense unless you are aware of the special rules around bankruptcy. In fact, the entire US lending market doesn't make sense unless you know about bankruptcy and bankruptcy law is by no means a safe basic assumption.
>This is a different economy, with its own legislative framework and where the people speak a language that is not English. But the frame is that they are basically a clone of the US and a policy change in Japan is equivalent to the policy change that sounds the most similar in the US.
Japan is practically the 51st state in the union, geopolitically speaking.
There is so much context required to interpret this, it really needs to be part of a "Japan Economy" wiki rather than a stand alone article.
But best of luck to Japan. Nobody ever asks for my opinion, but IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate. The evidence that markets are weak at setting interest rates is itself quite flimsy.