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Old 07-25-2011, 06:57 AM   #15
ZenGum
Doctor Wtf
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Badelaide, Baustralia
Posts: 12,861
Pretty much, yes.
Just going on memory here but since 1990, roughly, over that period:
interest rates have been between 0 and 1%
GDP has not grown
The stock market has not risen
all that debt has has been run up
unemployment was in the 2 to 3 % range.

Just remembering, though, what caused all this. The 1980s in Japan saw a bubble in the stock market and a big bubble in ... residential real estate. That's uncomfortably familiar.

IMHO, though Japan may have reached the "steady state" economy. [Grandpa rant] way back, Adam Smith founded economics, and he said: go forth and grow! And so the people grew their economies.
Then Marx said, this growing can't go on forever, it must self destruct. But it seems that he was premature, in that capitalism hasn't gone yet, although it gets a bit crook at times. Maybe he underestimated how far technology could go.
But even so, in terms of either finite natural resources or an approach to the maximum possible labour efficiency, economic growth must eventually stop, and yet not necessarily lead to the collapse Marx predicted, if it can get to a "rich enough" situation first.
And I think that Japan may have reached that state, the "steady state" economy. It doesn't need to grow any further. If they'd realised that 20 years ago, they wouldn't have thrown all that money around.
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