Thursday, March 21, 2013

Justifiable Thievery

To steal a single person's savings is a crime.

To steal an entire generation's savings is a policy.
Drawing "two wrongs make a right" through the grill of ratiocination, David Pilling, the former Tokyo Bureau chief of the Financial Times, lays out the case for the Abenomics policy of sotto voce confiscatory inflation. (Link)

2 comments:

Troy said...

I would just say everyone's savings in JGBs was deferred taxation.

What was lent to the government should have been taxed in the first place.

Who do people expect is going to pay Japan's quadrillion yen debt?

Country can't even raise taxes to close the current budget deficit.

What a joke. If I were running things I'd tax land values and housing rents directly, but that's a no-go policy, given whose oxen that gores.

Troy said...

ah, having logged in and read the piece, I obviously agree with most of it.

It's the current electorate's pusillanimity and passiveness since 1985 that has put Japan where it is now.

Not sure about the need for more worker productivity, though.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=gLa

shows it's a demographic thing.

plus even at 95, the yen is awfully strong compared to the yuan -- China's daily wage cost is Japan's hourly wage cost!