Capitalisn't

The Japanese economy was once the envy of the world. By the 1980s, it looked set to surpass the United States in size. Real estate prices were high, the stock market was booming—the entire world was asking if Japan had found a superior model of economic growth and recovery after World War II, one grounded in industrial policy.However, the bubble burst in the early 1990s, and what followed was not a quick recession and rebound as we have often seen in the U.S., but decades of stagnation. Near-zero deflation became entrenched, and the banking system turned into a drug of cheap borrowing rather than an engine for recovery, with the Bank of Japan pioneering quantitative easing by pushing interest rates to zero long before the U.S. Federal Reserve considered such steps in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. Japan has never since returned to sustainable growth, and this matters for the world at large. A significant creditor to other countries, shifts in Japan’s economic policy and fluctuations in its currency ri