På trods af finanskrisen anno 2008 på vores breddegrader kan man ikke undgå at blive overrasket og forundret over den heftige boble, Japan oplevede i 1980’erne, og efterdønningerne:
By 2004, residential real estate in Tokyo was only worth of 10% of its late 1980s peak, while the most expensive land in Tokyo’s Ginza business district had fallen back to just 1% of its 1989 level in the same year (Barsky, 2009). Similarly, the Nikkei stock index is now trading around 10,000, just little over a quarter of its all-time high. It has been over two decades since the popping of Japan’s economic bubble and the country is still actively battling with deflationary forces that are so powerful that near-zero interest rates (zero-interest rate policy or ZIRP), repeated bouts of quantitative easing (some call it “money printing”) and constant Yen-weakening currency interventions have barely made a dent.
Citatet er fra artiklen Japan’s Bubble Economy of the 1980s, som bestemt er værd at læse. Når man læser om Japans historie, er det også svært ikke at sammenligne med Kina, hvor landets virksomheder og befolkning samler så meget velstand at de køber vestlige virksomheder.
Japan’s Bubble Economy of the 1980s
The Bubble Bubble, Jesse Colombo