Turning Japanese: Japan's post-bubble policies produced a "lost decade." So why is President Obama emulating them?

AuthorRandazzo, Anthony
PositionCover story

THE SCENARIO WAS eerily familiar. A long real estate bubble that had expanded extra rapidly for the previous five years suddenly burst, and asset prices came crashing back down to earth. Banks and financial institutions were left holding piles of worthless paper, and the economy soon headed south. The national government responded to the crisis by encouraging more lending and spending previously unfathomable amounts of money on public works projects in an effort to stimulate consumer spending and restart growth.

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But that stimulus did not save the Japanese economy in the 1990s; far from it. The ensuing period came to be known as the Lost Decade, characterized by multiple recessions, an annual average growth rate of less than 1 percent, and a two-decade decline in stock prices and corporate profits.

The Japanese government's easing of credit rates, instead of spurring real demand, created artificial demand. Federal loans and stimulus spending were not economically productive, and they vastly increased the nation's debt and prolonged the economic malaise. Worse, businesses spent critical time on the sidelines, waiting for government bailouts and other centralized actions, instead of speedily consolidating their losses, clearing their balance sheets of bad investments, and reorganizing.

The United States in 2008-09, unfortunately, has started down the same path. Federal intervention and the expectation of additional government action are removing firms' incentive to clean up their balance sheets by selling "toxic" assets. Why accept pennies on the dollar if a deep-pocketed new bidder (i.e., the state) looms large on the scene? The Japanese experience shows that when the government is an active participant in the market, many firms would rather accept state support than initiate the inevitable financial reckoning. Such a status quo does not provide a sustainable foundation for the economy. Instead, it restricts economic growth and creates a cycle of stagnation.

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How Bubbles Form--and Burst

The Japanese asset bubble grew out of a long postwar economic boom that accelerated in the latter half of the 1980s, spurred in part by the central bank's loosening of monetary policy. With access to easy credit, businesses sped up the country's transformation into an economy based on technology, most prominently in the consumer electronics, telecommunications, and finance sectors.

The ensuing demand for new and better technology products, combined with increased living standards, fed an asset investment craze referred to as the Heisei boom after the took the Japanese throne in 1989. The value of the yen increased during this time, due primarily to the 1985 Plaza Accord, an agreement reached at an international conference in New York that depreciated the dollar against the yen, and Tokyo became a major financial services center. The Japanese Stock Market grew enormously, with the Nikkei 225 (an index similar to the Dow Jones Industrial Average) more than tripling between 1985 and the end of 1989.

Times looked so good that U.S. bestseller lists were sprinkled with anxious tracts about Japan eclipsing the country that had defeated it militarily less than half a century before. But a more real threat was hiding in plain sight: Japanese asset prices, after rising precipitously, were about to come crashing down to earth.

The late-'80s Japanese bubble and the mid-'00s American bubble had similar causes that are worth pondering:

Overaggressive financial institutions and poor risk management that ignored traditional economic fundamentals. In both Japan and the U.S., excessively optimistic expectations led to bad investment decisions from Wall Street to Main Street and a pervasive culture of denial that there was any bubble at all.

Japanese asset inflation was fueled by a 51 percent average growth rate in housing prices and an 80 percent increase in average commercial property values between 1985 and 1991. This spike created an overconfident climate in which investors failed to adequately prepare for a correction. Since that peak, asset values in Japan have fallen by more than 40 percent as of 2008.

Japan was flush with capital in the 1980s, in part due to an export boom that started the decade before. The country was becoming an increasingly important player in the world financial system, and international investors came looking for a stake. In the preceding years, Japanese individuals and firms had built up a large pool of savings and begun investing those resources in real property. This rapid rate of investment pushed the value of land, buildings, and other capital investments higher, encouraging even more investment, and in turn speculation, based on the belief that values and returns would keep rising.

Riding this asset appreciation, Japanese banks borrowed nearly [yen] 200 trillion ($3.4 trillion in today's dollars) from foreign markets. This sum sloshed throughout the Japanese economy. The lending was further fueled by tiny debt-to-equity requirements, a relatively recent development that encouraged financial institutions to heavily leverage their bets. By 1991 Japanese banks held reserves of only 3 trillion [yen] to cover the 450 trillion [yen] they had lent. Normally, such a lopsided portfolio would have triggered widespread concern. But the economic climate in Japan back then was often described as "euphoric" Prudence was not in vogue.

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The American housing bubble was bigger, although values have yet to fall as much as those of Japanese real estate. Between 2000 and 2006, average home prices in the U.S. grew by 90 percent, and commercial property values rose at the same rate. Since the peak in July 2006, home prices nationwide have declined more...

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