by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Japan has proven that decay can be stretched into decades, but it has yet to prove that gravity can be revoked by central bank monetary games.
Japan’s fiscal and monetary extremes are in the news again: this time it’s the Bank of Japan’s extraordinarily large ownership of Japanese stocks, a policy intended to boost “investor sentiment” and prop up sagging equity valuations:
[…] The core failure of Japan’s central bank and state is they have attempted to substitute monetary games for desperately needed social, political and economic reforms. This is the Keynesian ideology and project in a single sentence:
Keynesian policy holds that expansionary monetary and fiscal policy can be substituted for structural social, political and economic reforms, enabling the status quo to retain its power and privileges without disruption.