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27-03-2012, 02:23 PM
Both of them sound very compelling.
Andy Xie - The Yen's Looming Day of Reckoning
Japan looks set to depress the value of the yen to boost trade – how China must brace itself for the impact
Japan is on an unsustainable path of a strong yen and deflation. The unprofitability of Japan's major exporters and emerging trade deficits suggest that the end of this path is in sight. The transition from a strong to weak yen will likely be abrupt, involving a sudden and big devaluation of 30 to 40 percent. It will be a big shock to Japan's neighbors and its distant competitors like Germany. The yen's devaluation in 1996 was a main factor in triggering the Asian Financial Crisis. Japan's neighbors must have a strong banking system to withstand a bigger devaluation of the yen.
Self-inflicted Deflation
Japan's nominal GDP contracted 8 percent in the four years to the third quarter of 2011, and six percentage points of that was due to deflation. Without increased government expenditure, the contraction will be one percentage point more. Japan has not seen this kind of sustained deflation since the 1930s.
Without government deficits, Japan's economy will decline much more. Central government bonds and borrowings plus its guaranteed debts rose by 116.3 trillion yen during the period, equivalent to one-fourth of the level of the nominal GDP in the third quarter of 2011. If Japan had adopted balanced budgets, its economy would have contracted two to three times more. This will lead to a debt crisis in its private sector.
A strong yen, deflation and rising government debt form a short-term equilibrium that lasts as long as the market believes it is sustainable. The yen has seen a relentless upward trend since it depegged from the dollar in 1971, up to 83.4 from 360 again to the dollar. When wages and asset prices rise, a strong currency can be justified. When wages and asset prices fall, a strong currency is suicide. Japan's nominal GDP peaked in 1997 and its nominal wages did too. Its property prices have declined every year since. The Nikkei rose in only four out of the last fifteen years and is still close to a three-decade low.
Japanese policymakers, businesses, academics, currency traders and the average Mrs. Watanabe all believe in a strong yen. This belief is wrong but self-fulfilling. It has lasted so long because the Japanese government adopts policies to offset the destabilizing effects of deflation due to a strong yen. Hence, Japan's national debt has marched upwards along with the value of yen. It is expected to top yen 1,000 trillion in 2012, 215 percent of GDP, 7.8 million yen (or roughly US$ 94,000) per person, and about half of net household wealth per capita.
The sustainability of Japan's deflationary path depends on the market's confidence in Japan's debt market. As Japanese institutions and households hold almost all of the government's debts, their faith in the government's creditworthiness is the mojo for Japan's seemingly harmless deflationary spiral.
A Vast Bubble
In a normal market, greater supply leads to lower prices. The opposite occurs in a bubble; faith in price stability or appreciation exaggerates demand. Japan has the highest level of government debt and the lowest bond yield. The later is necessary for the former. Even though the yield on 10-year Japanese Government Bonds (JGB) is only 1 percent, the interest expense is expected to top 22.3 trillion yen in the fiscal year that begins next month. This is one-quarter of the general account budget. If the bond yield rises to 2 percent, the interest expense would surpass the total expected tax revenue of 42.3 trillion yen.
In addition to its fiscal vulnerability to a rising interest rate, Japan's budget deficit is still too high. The government budgeted 44 trillion yen in net additional borrowing in the next fiscal year, nearly half of its expenditures. It needs to double its tax revenue to balance the budget. But, as the economy is deflating with declining private consumption, a major tax increase would cause the economy to go down more, shrinking the tax base and requiring even bigger tax increases to balance the budget. Even though the government plans to achieve a primary fiscal surplus, i.e., revenue above non-interest expense, by fiscal 2020 to 2021, it is difficult to see how.
The justification for the low JGB yield is deflation. The real interest rate (the nominal rate plus deflation) is comparable to that in other countries. This rationale requires deflation to persist. But, deflation shrinks the nominal GDP or tax base. How could the government pay back its escalating debt by taxing a shrinking economy? It can only sustain its debt by borrowing more. This fits the definition of a particular type of Ponzi scheme.
The JGB bubble explains the seeming lack of pain in Japanese society. A strong yen and deflation haven't led to an employment crisis because the government deficit is pumping up aggregate demand. As long as wages decline in line with prices, one doesn't feel the pain. Japan's household debt is only half of GDP, about half of the level in the United States. Deflation doesn't cause much balance sheet trouble.
The Strong Yen Bubble
Yen bulls usually point at Japan's trade and current account surplus as supporting factors. A trade surplus can reflect a country's competitiveness or lack of it. Current account surplus is savings minus investment. When investment declines, the trade surplus is boosted. When a country cuts investment, it signals declining competitiveness. Hence, the current account surplus shouldn't be viewed as a supporting factor for strong currency.
The combination of a weak economy and strong currency are always suspect. But it has lasted for so long that even foreigners take it for granted. I think this is some sort of mass hysteria. Most people only remember a strong yen. On the other hand, most people haven't seen rising property or stock markets either.
Japanese culture is group-oriented. Individuals usually embrace group activities. This psyche was the reason that Japan's property bubble became so big in the 1980s. In terms of value above the normal level, Japan's bubble was five to six times the size of the bubble in the United States. After the property bubble, the group psyche shifted its power to a strong yen, pushing Japan's economy onto the path of a rising yen, deflation and rising government debt.
Japan's paralyzed political system is the reason the government has accommodated the deflation path by running up national debt. The Japanese people, on the other hand, buy the debt because deflation makes property or stocks bad investments and a strong yen discourages them from buying foreign assets and deflation.
Despite the fact Japan has had a bad economy for so long, the yen has remained strong. It reinforces the Japanese psyche on the issue. The strong yen has become a cult.
The international financial market believes in a weak yen from time to time. In 1998, the short-selling by foreigners briefly caused the yen to touch 140 against the U.S. dollar. But, as the Japanese hold all of the yen, if they believe in the yen, foreign short-sellers get punished eventually. Over time, yen bears are all weeded out of the market. The remaining yen traders are all believers in a strong yen.
The End is in Sight
No bubble is sustainable. While the Japanese can always take care of business within, they cannot control the outside world. The country's Achilles heel is losing trade competitiveness due to the destructive impact of deflation on business confidence and the strong currency itself. When a trade deficit emerges, it signals the beginning of the end.
Japan has lost competitiveness in a swath of industries that it used to dominate. Its automobile industry is losing out to Germany, South Korea and the United States. Japan's automobile industry used to be competitive in cost and far superior in quality to its global competitors. But the world has changed. The yen has dropped below 110 from as high as 160 against the euro. The South Korean won was about ten against the yen and is now 13. Cost-cutting cannot offset such a big change in exchange rates. The U.S. auto industry cut its labor costs and debt burden through the government bailout. It is now more competitive than Japan's.
The automobile industry is the pillar of Japan's economy. Its decline leaves Japan's economy nowhere to turn. Indeed, if the auto industry leaves Japan, it will become a poor country.
Japan's electronics industry, still significant to its economy, is losing out big time to its Asian competitors. Nothing hot in electronics is made in Japan now. U.S. companies like Apple leverage China's manufacturing sector to turn out hot products. South Korea is embracing the vertically integrated model and churning out competitive products like Japan used to.
Nothing symbolizes Japan's decline like its electronics industry. It was the envy of the world and had all the ingredients to take the industry into the mobile internet era. Instead, it embraced insulation and made products just for the Japanese market. Now it is almost irrelevant to the outside world.
Japan isn't just facing macro troubles. Its micro competitiveness is rotting away. It is just bizarre to see that the whole world believes in a strong yen when Japan is failing on such a grand scale.
Japan's trade balance may swing into surplus from time to time, but the negative trend is irreversible. Japan will face rising trade deficits. That makes foreigners' views important because Japan would need foreign money to fund its deficit. When foreigners change their views, which they surely will, the yen will crash.
The Only Way Out
Japan has only one way out – a massive devaluation. If the stable national debt is 120 percent of GDP, the yen needs to be devalued by 40 percent because devaluation is ultimately equal to the nominal GDP increase. The devaluation is likely to sustain 2 percent to 3 percent of nominal GDP growth for Japan beyond the repricing induced increase, which is necessary to restore Japan's tax revenue. Deflation has caused Japan's tax revenue to decline as a share of GDP. It can be only reversed through restoring nominal GDP. A devaluation of 40 percent can restore Japan's competitiveness against Germany and South Korea, which will lay the foundation for Japan's industrial recovery.
The Bank of Japan is trying to weaken the yen through expanding its balance sheet. It has an asset purchase program of 65 trillion yen and a lending program of 5.5 trillion yen. The two are equivalent to 15 percent of GDP, comparable to what the Fed or European Central Bank have done. The effectiveness is limited so far. Because Japanese businesses, households and investors believe in a strong yen, the printed yen largely stays in the country and just slows down money velocity. The U.S. dollar has risen 10 percent against the yen from last year's bottom. This is probably due to the financial market upgrading its view of the U.S. economy rather than the BoJ's action.
Yen devaluation is likely to unfold quickly. A financial bubble doesn't burst slowly. When it occurs, it just pops. The odds are that yen devaluation will occur over days. Only a large and sudden devaluation can keep the JGB yield low. Otherwise, the devaluation expectation will trigger a sharp rise in the JGB yield. The resulting worries over the government's solvency could lead to a collapse of the JGB market. Of course, the government will collapse with the JGB market.
The day of reckoning for the yen is not distant. Japanese companies are struggling with profitability. It only gets worse from here. When a major company goes bankrupt, this may change the prevailing psychology. A weak yen consensus will emerge then.
China and South Korea
A yen collapse will impact China and South Korea most, just like in 1998. It will trigger substantial weakness in their industries. If a banking system succumbs, the shock can bring down an entire economy, as South Korea's experience in 1998 demonstrates.
Both China and South Korea have weak banking systems. South Korea's banking system is one of the most leveraged in the world due to high level of household loans. In 1998, a similar shock sank its banking system that was overleveraged with industrial loans. Now it is overleveraged with household loans. A shock could sink it again.
Overinvestment and a property bubble make China's banking system very vulnerable to such a shock. Unless China substantially increases the capital in its banking system, a big yen devaluation could cause China's banking system to sink. China suffers from overinvestment and a property bubble, as Southeast Asia and South Korea did in 1997. In terms of the magnitude of leverage, China's situation is much worse. Hence, a yen devaluation could wreak havoc to China's economy.
The Myth of Japan’s Failure
By EAMONN FINGLETON
Published: January 6, 2012
Times Topic: Japan — Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Crisis (2011)
DESPITE some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.
Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”
But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.
Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.
How can the reality and the image be so different? And can the United States learn from Japan’s experience?
It is true that Japanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they briefly touched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.
But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people is evident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quite square with Japan’s image as the laughingstock of the business pages:
• Japan’s average life expectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years — to 83 years from 78.8 years — between 1989 and 2009. This means the Japanese now typically live 4.8 years longer than Americans. The progress, moreover, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, diet. The Japanese people are eating more Western food than ever. The key driver has been better health care.
• Japan has made remarkable strides in Internet infrastructure. Although as late as the mid-1990s it was ridiculed as lagging, it has now turned the tables. In a recent survey by Akamai Technologies, of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service, 38 were in Japan, compared to only 3 in the United States.
• Measured from the end of 1989, the yen has risen 87 percent against the U.S. dollar and 94 percent against the British pound. It has even risen against that traditional icon of monetary rectitude, the Swiss franc.
• The unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, about half of that in the United States.
• According to skyscraperpage.com, a Web site that tracks major buildings around the world, 81 high-rise buildings taller than 500 feet have been constructed in Tokyo since the “lost decades” began. That compares with 64 in New York, 48 in Chicago, and 7 in Los Angeles.
• Japan’s current account surplus — the widest measure of its trade — totaled $196 billion in 2010, up more than threefold since 1989. By comparison, America’s current account deficit ballooned to $471 billion from $99 billion in that time. Although in the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that as a result of China’s rise Japan would be a major loser and the United States a major winner, it has not turned out that way. Japan has increased its exports to China more than 14-fold since 1989 and Chinese-Japanese bilateral trade remains in broad balance.
As longtime Japan watchers like Ivan P. Hall and Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. point out, the fallacy of the “lost decades” story is apparent to American visitors the moment they set foot in the country. Typically starting their journeys at such potent symbols of American infrastructural decay as Kennedy or Dulles airports, they land at Japanese airports that have been extensively expanded and modernized in recent years.
William J. Holstein, a prominent Japan watcher since the early 1980s, recently visited the country for the first time in some years. “There’s a dramatic gap between what one reads in the United States and what one sees on the ground in Japan,” he said. “The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. I have never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of the country keeps improving and evolving.”
Why, then, is Japan seen as a loser? On the official gross domestic product numbers, the United States has ostensibly outperformed Japan for many years. But even taking America’s official numbers at face value, the difference has been far narrower than people realize. Adjusted to a per-capita basis (which is the proper way to do this) and measured since 1989, America’s G.D.P. grew by an average of just 1.4 percent a year. Japan’s figure meanwhile was even more anemic — just 1 percent — implying that it underperformed the United States by 0.4 percent a year.
A look at the underlying accounting, however, suggests that, far from underperforming, Japan may have outperformed. For a start, in a little noticed change, United States statisticians in the 1980s embarked on an increasingly aggressive use of the so-called hedonic method of adjusting for inflation, an approach that in the view of many experts artificially boosts a nation’s apparent growth rate.
On the calculations of John Williams of Shadowstats.com, a Web site that tracks flaws in United States economic data, America’s growth in recent decades has been overstated by as much as 2 percentage points a year. If he is even close to the truth, this factor alone may put the United States behind Japan in per-capita performance.
If the Japanese have really been hurting, the most obvious place this would show would be in slow adoption of expensive new high-tech items. Yet the Japanese are consistently among the world’s earliest adopters. If anything, it is Americans who have been lagging. In cellphones, for instance, Japan leapfrogged the United States in the space of a few years in the late 1990s and it has stayed ahead ever since, with consumers moving exceptionally rapidly to ever more advanced devices.
Much of the story is qualitative rather than quantitative. An example is Japan’s eating-out culture. Tokyo, according to the Michelin Guide, boasts 16 of the world’s top-ranked restaurants, versus a mere 10 for the runner-up, Paris. Similarly Japan as a whole beats France in the Michelin ratings. But how do you express this in G.D.P. terms?
Similar problems arise in measuring improvements in the Japanese health care system. And how does one accurately convey the vast improvement in the general environment in Japan in the last two decades?
Luckily there is a yardstick that finesses many of these problems: electricity output, which is mainly a measure of consumer affluence and industrial activity. In the 1990s, while Japan was being widely portrayed as an outright “basket case,” its rate of increase in per-capita electricity output was twice that of America, and it continued to outperform into the new century.
Part of what is going on here is Western psychology. Anyone who has followed the story long-term cannot help but notice that many Westerners actively seek to belittle Japan. Thus every policy success is automatically discounted. It is a mind-set that is much in evidence even among Tokyo-based Western diplomats and scholars.
Take, for instance, how Western observers have viewed Japan’s demographics. The population is getting older because of a low birthrate, a characteristic Japan shares with many of the world’s richest nations. Yet this is presented not only as a critical problem but as a policy failure. It never seems to occur to Western commentators that the Japanese both individually and collectively have chosen their demographic fate — and have good reasons for doing so.
The story begins in the terrible winter of 1945-6, when, newly bereft of their empire, the Japanese nearly starved to death. With overseas expansion no longer an option, Japanese leaders determined as a top priority to cut the birthrate. Thereafter a culture of small families set in that has continued to the present day.
Japan’s motivation is clear: food security. With only about one-third as much arable land per capita as China, Japan has long been the world’s largest net food importer. While the birth control policy is the primary cause of Japan’s aging demographics, the phenomenon also reflects improved health care and an increase of more than 20 years in life expectancy since 1950.
Psychology aside, a major factor in the West’s comprehension problem is that virtually everyone in Tokyo benefits from the doom and gloom story. For foreign sales representatives, for instance, it has been the perfect get-out-of-jail card when they don’t reach their quotas. For Japanese foundations it is the perfect excuse in politely waving away solicitations from American universities and other needy nonprofits. Ditto for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in tempering expectations of foreign aid recipients. Even American investment bankers have reasons to emphasize bad news. Most notably they profit from the so-called yen-carry trade, an arcane but powerful investment strategy in which the well informed benefit from periodic bouts of weakness in the Japanese yen.
Economic ideology has also played an unfortunate role. Many economists, particularly right-wing think-tank types, are such staunch advocates of laissez-faire that they reflexively scorn Japan’s very different economic system, with its socialist medicine and ubiquitous government regulation. During the stock market bubble of the late 1980s, this mind-set abated but it came back after the crash.
Japanese trade negotiators noticed an almost magical sweetening in the mood in foreign capitals after the stock market crashed in 1990. Although previously there had been much envy of Japan abroad (and serious talk of protectionist measures), in the new circumstances American and European trade negotiators switched to feeling sorry for the “fallen giant.” Nothing if not fast learners, Japanese trade negotiators have been appealing for sympathy ever since.
The strategy seems to have been particularly effective in Washington. Believing that you shouldn’t kick a man when he is down, chivalrous American officials have largely given up pressing for the opening of Japan’s markets. Yet the great United States trade complaints of the late 1980s — concerning rice, financial services, cars and car components — were never remedied.
The “fallen giant” story has also even been useful to other East Asian nations, particularly in their trade diplomacy with the United States.
A striking instance of how the story has influenced American perceptions appears in “The Next 100 Years,” by the consultant George Friedman. In a chapter headed “China 2020: Paper Tiger,” Mr. Friedman argues that, just as Japan “failed” in the 1990s, China will soon have its comeuppance. Talk of this sort powerfully fosters complacency and confusion in Washington in the face of a United States-China trade relationship that is already arguably the most destructive in world history and certainly the most unbalanced.
Clearly the question of what has really happened to Japan is of first-order geopolitical importance. In a stunning refutation of American conventional wisdom, Japan has not missed a beat in building an ever more sophisticated industrial base. That this is not more obvious is a tribute in part to the fact that Japanese manufacturers have graduated to making so-called producers’ goods. These typically consist of advanced components or materials, or precision production equipment. They may be invisible to the consumer, yet without them the modern world literally would not exist. This sort of manufacturing, which is both highly capital-intensive and highly know-how-intensive, was virtually monopolized by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and constituted the essence of American economic leadership.
Japan’s achievement is all the more impressive for the fact that its major competitors — Germany, South Korea, Taiwan and, of course, China — have hardly been standing still. The world has gone through a rapid industrial revolution in the last two decades thanks to the “targeting” of manufacturing by many East Asian nations. Yet Japan’s trade surpluses have risen.
Japan should be held up as a model, not an admonition. If a nation can summon the will to pull together, it can turn even the most unpromising circumstances to advantage. Here Japan’s constant upgrading of its infrastructure is surely an inspiration. It is a strategy that often requires cooperation across a wide political front, but such cooperation has not been beyond the American political system in the past. The Hoover Dam, that iconic project of the Depression, required negotiations among seven states but somehow it was built — and it provided jobs for 16,000 people in the process. Nothing is stopping similar progress now — nothing, except political bickering.
Eamonn Fingleton is an author who predicted the Japanese financial crash of the 1990s; he is working on a book about the end of the American dream.
Andy Xie - The Yen's Looming Day of Reckoning
Japan looks set to depress the value of the yen to boost trade – how China must brace itself for the impact
Japan is on an unsustainable path of a strong yen and deflation. The unprofitability of Japan's major exporters and emerging trade deficits suggest that the end of this path is in sight. The transition from a strong to weak yen will likely be abrupt, involving a sudden and big devaluation of 30 to 40 percent. It will be a big shock to Japan's neighbors and its distant competitors like Germany. The yen's devaluation in 1996 was a main factor in triggering the Asian Financial Crisis. Japan's neighbors must have a strong banking system to withstand a bigger devaluation of the yen.
Self-inflicted Deflation
Japan's nominal GDP contracted 8 percent in the four years to the third quarter of 2011, and six percentage points of that was due to deflation. Without increased government expenditure, the contraction will be one percentage point more. Japan has not seen this kind of sustained deflation since the 1930s.
Without government deficits, Japan's economy will decline much more. Central government bonds and borrowings plus its guaranteed debts rose by 116.3 trillion yen during the period, equivalent to one-fourth of the level of the nominal GDP in the third quarter of 2011. If Japan had adopted balanced budgets, its economy would have contracted two to three times more. This will lead to a debt crisis in its private sector.
A strong yen, deflation and rising government debt form a short-term equilibrium that lasts as long as the market believes it is sustainable. The yen has seen a relentless upward trend since it depegged from the dollar in 1971, up to 83.4 from 360 again to the dollar. When wages and asset prices rise, a strong currency can be justified. When wages and asset prices fall, a strong currency is suicide. Japan's nominal GDP peaked in 1997 and its nominal wages did too. Its property prices have declined every year since. The Nikkei rose in only four out of the last fifteen years and is still close to a three-decade low.
Japanese policymakers, businesses, academics, currency traders and the average Mrs. Watanabe all believe in a strong yen. This belief is wrong but self-fulfilling. It has lasted so long because the Japanese government adopts policies to offset the destabilizing effects of deflation due to a strong yen. Hence, Japan's national debt has marched upwards along with the value of yen. It is expected to top yen 1,000 trillion in 2012, 215 percent of GDP, 7.8 million yen (or roughly US$ 94,000) per person, and about half of net household wealth per capita.
The sustainability of Japan's deflationary path depends on the market's confidence in Japan's debt market. As Japanese institutions and households hold almost all of the government's debts, their faith in the government's creditworthiness is the mojo for Japan's seemingly harmless deflationary spiral.
A Vast Bubble
In a normal market, greater supply leads to lower prices. The opposite occurs in a bubble; faith in price stability or appreciation exaggerates demand. Japan has the highest level of government debt and the lowest bond yield. The later is necessary for the former. Even though the yield on 10-year Japanese Government Bonds (JGB) is only 1 percent, the interest expense is expected to top 22.3 trillion yen in the fiscal year that begins next month. This is one-quarter of the general account budget. If the bond yield rises to 2 percent, the interest expense would surpass the total expected tax revenue of 42.3 trillion yen.
In addition to its fiscal vulnerability to a rising interest rate, Japan's budget deficit is still too high. The government budgeted 44 trillion yen in net additional borrowing in the next fiscal year, nearly half of its expenditures. It needs to double its tax revenue to balance the budget. But, as the economy is deflating with declining private consumption, a major tax increase would cause the economy to go down more, shrinking the tax base and requiring even bigger tax increases to balance the budget. Even though the government plans to achieve a primary fiscal surplus, i.e., revenue above non-interest expense, by fiscal 2020 to 2021, it is difficult to see how.
The justification for the low JGB yield is deflation. The real interest rate (the nominal rate plus deflation) is comparable to that in other countries. This rationale requires deflation to persist. But, deflation shrinks the nominal GDP or tax base. How could the government pay back its escalating debt by taxing a shrinking economy? It can only sustain its debt by borrowing more. This fits the definition of a particular type of Ponzi scheme.
The JGB bubble explains the seeming lack of pain in Japanese society. A strong yen and deflation haven't led to an employment crisis because the government deficit is pumping up aggregate demand. As long as wages decline in line with prices, one doesn't feel the pain. Japan's household debt is only half of GDP, about half of the level in the United States. Deflation doesn't cause much balance sheet trouble.
The Strong Yen Bubble
Yen bulls usually point at Japan's trade and current account surplus as supporting factors. A trade surplus can reflect a country's competitiveness or lack of it. Current account surplus is savings minus investment. When investment declines, the trade surplus is boosted. When a country cuts investment, it signals declining competitiveness. Hence, the current account surplus shouldn't be viewed as a supporting factor for strong currency.
The combination of a weak economy and strong currency are always suspect. But it has lasted for so long that even foreigners take it for granted. I think this is some sort of mass hysteria. Most people only remember a strong yen. On the other hand, most people haven't seen rising property or stock markets either.
Japanese culture is group-oriented. Individuals usually embrace group activities. This psyche was the reason that Japan's property bubble became so big in the 1980s. In terms of value above the normal level, Japan's bubble was five to six times the size of the bubble in the United States. After the property bubble, the group psyche shifted its power to a strong yen, pushing Japan's economy onto the path of a rising yen, deflation and rising government debt.
Japan's paralyzed political system is the reason the government has accommodated the deflation path by running up national debt. The Japanese people, on the other hand, buy the debt because deflation makes property or stocks bad investments and a strong yen discourages them from buying foreign assets and deflation.
Despite the fact Japan has had a bad economy for so long, the yen has remained strong. It reinforces the Japanese psyche on the issue. The strong yen has become a cult.
The international financial market believes in a weak yen from time to time. In 1998, the short-selling by foreigners briefly caused the yen to touch 140 against the U.S. dollar. But, as the Japanese hold all of the yen, if they believe in the yen, foreign short-sellers get punished eventually. Over time, yen bears are all weeded out of the market. The remaining yen traders are all believers in a strong yen.
The End is in Sight
No bubble is sustainable. While the Japanese can always take care of business within, they cannot control the outside world. The country's Achilles heel is losing trade competitiveness due to the destructive impact of deflation on business confidence and the strong currency itself. When a trade deficit emerges, it signals the beginning of the end.
Japan has lost competitiveness in a swath of industries that it used to dominate. Its automobile industry is losing out to Germany, South Korea and the United States. Japan's automobile industry used to be competitive in cost and far superior in quality to its global competitors. But the world has changed. The yen has dropped below 110 from as high as 160 against the euro. The South Korean won was about ten against the yen and is now 13. Cost-cutting cannot offset such a big change in exchange rates. The U.S. auto industry cut its labor costs and debt burden through the government bailout. It is now more competitive than Japan's.
The automobile industry is the pillar of Japan's economy. Its decline leaves Japan's economy nowhere to turn. Indeed, if the auto industry leaves Japan, it will become a poor country.
Japan's electronics industry, still significant to its economy, is losing out big time to its Asian competitors. Nothing hot in electronics is made in Japan now. U.S. companies like Apple leverage China's manufacturing sector to turn out hot products. South Korea is embracing the vertically integrated model and churning out competitive products like Japan used to.
Nothing symbolizes Japan's decline like its electronics industry. It was the envy of the world and had all the ingredients to take the industry into the mobile internet era. Instead, it embraced insulation and made products just for the Japanese market. Now it is almost irrelevant to the outside world.
Japan isn't just facing macro troubles. Its micro competitiveness is rotting away. It is just bizarre to see that the whole world believes in a strong yen when Japan is failing on such a grand scale.
Japan's trade balance may swing into surplus from time to time, but the negative trend is irreversible. Japan will face rising trade deficits. That makes foreigners' views important because Japan would need foreign money to fund its deficit. When foreigners change their views, which they surely will, the yen will crash.
The Only Way Out
Japan has only one way out – a massive devaluation. If the stable national debt is 120 percent of GDP, the yen needs to be devalued by 40 percent because devaluation is ultimately equal to the nominal GDP increase. The devaluation is likely to sustain 2 percent to 3 percent of nominal GDP growth for Japan beyond the repricing induced increase, which is necessary to restore Japan's tax revenue. Deflation has caused Japan's tax revenue to decline as a share of GDP. It can be only reversed through restoring nominal GDP. A devaluation of 40 percent can restore Japan's competitiveness against Germany and South Korea, which will lay the foundation for Japan's industrial recovery.
The Bank of Japan is trying to weaken the yen through expanding its balance sheet. It has an asset purchase program of 65 trillion yen and a lending program of 5.5 trillion yen. The two are equivalent to 15 percent of GDP, comparable to what the Fed or European Central Bank have done. The effectiveness is limited so far. Because Japanese businesses, households and investors believe in a strong yen, the printed yen largely stays in the country and just slows down money velocity. The U.S. dollar has risen 10 percent against the yen from last year's bottom. This is probably due to the financial market upgrading its view of the U.S. economy rather than the BoJ's action.
Yen devaluation is likely to unfold quickly. A financial bubble doesn't burst slowly. When it occurs, it just pops. The odds are that yen devaluation will occur over days. Only a large and sudden devaluation can keep the JGB yield low. Otherwise, the devaluation expectation will trigger a sharp rise in the JGB yield. The resulting worries over the government's solvency could lead to a collapse of the JGB market. Of course, the government will collapse with the JGB market.
The day of reckoning for the yen is not distant. Japanese companies are struggling with profitability. It only gets worse from here. When a major company goes bankrupt, this may change the prevailing psychology. A weak yen consensus will emerge then.
China and South Korea
A yen collapse will impact China and South Korea most, just like in 1998. It will trigger substantial weakness in their industries. If a banking system succumbs, the shock can bring down an entire economy, as South Korea's experience in 1998 demonstrates.
Both China and South Korea have weak banking systems. South Korea's banking system is one of the most leveraged in the world due to high level of household loans. In 1998, a similar shock sank its banking system that was overleveraged with industrial loans. Now it is overleveraged with household loans. A shock could sink it again.
Overinvestment and a property bubble make China's banking system very vulnerable to such a shock. Unless China substantially increases the capital in its banking system, a big yen devaluation could cause China's banking system to sink. China suffers from overinvestment and a property bubble, as Southeast Asia and South Korea did in 1997. In terms of the magnitude of leverage, China's situation is much worse. Hence, a yen devaluation could wreak havoc to China's economy.
The Myth of Japan’s Failure
By EAMONN FINGLETON
Published: January 6, 2012
Times Topic: Japan — Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Crisis (2011)
DESPITE some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.
Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”
But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.
Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.
How can the reality and the image be so different? And can the United States learn from Japan’s experience?
It is true that Japanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they briefly touched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.
But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people is evident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quite square with Japan’s image as the laughingstock of the business pages:
• Japan’s average life expectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years — to 83 years from 78.8 years — between 1989 and 2009. This means the Japanese now typically live 4.8 years longer than Americans. The progress, moreover, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, diet. The Japanese people are eating more Western food than ever. The key driver has been better health care.
• Japan has made remarkable strides in Internet infrastructure. Although as late as the mid-1990s it was ridiculed as lagging, it has now turned the tables. In a recent survey by Akamai Technologies, of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service, 38 were in Japan, compared to only 3 in the United States.
• Measured from the end of 1989, the yen has risen 87 percent against the U.S. dollar and 94 percent against the British pound. It has even risen against that traditional icon of monetary rectitude, the Swiss franc.
• The unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, about half of that in the United States.
• According to skyscraperpage.com, a Web site that tracks major buildings around the world, 81 high-rise buildings taller than 500 feet have been constructed in Tokyo since the “lost decades” began. That compares with 64 in New York, 48 in Chicago, and 7 in Los Angeles.
• Japan’s current account surplus — the widest measure of its trade — totaled $196 billion in 2010, up more than threefold since 1989. By comparison, America’s current account deficit ballooned to $471 billion from $99 billion in that time. Although in the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that as a result of China’s rise Japan would be a major loser and the United States a major winner, it has not turned out that way. Japan has increased its exports to China more than 14-fold since 1989 and Chinese-Japanese bilateral trade remains in broad balance.
As longtime Japan watchers like Ivan P. Hall and Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. point out, the fallacy of the “lost decades” story is apparent to American visitors the moment they set foot in the country. Typically starting their journeys at such potent symbols of American infrastructural decay as Kennedy or Dulles airports, they land at Japanese airports that have been extensively expanded and modernized in recent years.
William J. Holstein, a prominent Japan watcher since the early 1980s, recently visited the country for the first time in some years. “There’s a dramatic gap between what one reads in the United States and what one sees on the ground in Japan,” he said. “The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. I have never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of the country keeps improving and evolving.”
Why, then, is Japan seen as a loser? On the official gross domestic product numbers, the United States has ostensibly outperformed Japan for many years. But even taking America’s official numbers at face value, the difference has been far narrower than people realize. Adjusted to a per-capita basis (which is the proper way to do this) and measured since 1989, America’s G.D.P. grew by an average of just 1.4 percent a year. Japan’s figure meanwhile was even more anemic — just 1 percent — implying that it underperformed the United States by 0.4 percent a year.
A look at the underlying accounting, however, suggests that, far from underperforming, Japan may have outperformed. For a start, in a little noticed change, United States statisticians in the 1980s embarked on an increasingly aggressive use of the so-called hedonic method of adjusting for inflation, an approach that in the view of many experts artificially boosts a nation’s apparent growth rate.
On the calculations of John Williams of Shadowstats.com, a Web site that tracks flaws in United States economic data, America’s growth in recent decades has been overstated by as much as 2 percentage points a year. If he is even close to the truth, this factor alone may put the United States behind Japan in per-capita performance.
If the Japanese have really been hurting, the most obvious place this would show would be in slow adoption of expensive new high-tech items. Yet the Japanese are consistently among the world’s earliest adopters. If anything, it is Americans who have been lagging. In cellphones, for instance, Japan leapfrogged the United States in the space of a few years in the late 1990s and it has stayed ahead ever since, with consumers moving exceptionally rapidly to ever more advanced devices.
Much of the story is qualitative rather than quantitative. An example is Japan’s eating-out culture. Tokyo, according to the Michelin Guide, boasts 16 of the world’s top-ranked restaurants, versus a mere 10 for the runner-up, Paris. Similarly Japan as a whole beats France in the Michelin ratings. But how do you express this in G.D.P. terms?
Similar problems arise in measuring improvements in the Japanese health care system. And how does one accurately convey the vast improvement in the general environment in Japan in the last two decades?
Luckily there is a yardstick that finesses many of these problems: electricity output, which is mainly a measure of consumer affluence and industrial activity. In the 1990s, while Japan was being widely portrayed as an outright “basket case,” its rate of increase in per-capita electricity output was twice that of America, and it continued to outperform into the new century.
Part of what is going on here is Western psychology. Anyone who has followed the story long-term cannot help but notice that many Westerners actively seek to belittle Japan. Thus every policy success is automatically discounted. It is a mind-set that is much in evidence even among Tokyo-based Western diplomats and scholars.
Take, for instance, how Western observers have viewed Japan’s demographics. The population is getting older because of a low birthrate, a characteristic Japan shares with many of the world’s richest nations. Yet this is presented not only as a critical problem but as a policy failure. It never seems to occur to Western commentators that the Japanese both individually and collectively have chosen their demographic fate — and have good reasons for doing so.
The story begins in the terrible winter of 1945-6, when, newly bereft of their empire, the Japanese nearly starved to death. With overseas expansion no longer an option, Japanese leaders determined as a top priority to cut the birthrate. Thereafter a culture of small families set in that has continued to the present day.
Japan’s motivation is clear: food security. With only about one-third as much arable land per capita as China, Japan has long been the world’s largest net food importer. While the birth control policy is the primary cause of Japan’s aging demographics, the phenomenon also reflects improved health care and an increase of more than 20 years in life expectancy since 1950.
Psychology aside, a major factor in the West’s comprehension problem is that virtually everyone in Tokyo benefits from the doom and gloom story. For foreign sales representatives, for instance, it has been the perfect get-out-of-jail card when they don’t reach their quotas. For Japanese foundations it is the perfect excuse in politely waving away solicitations from American universities and other needy nonprofits. Ditto for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in tempering expectations of foreign aid recipients. Even American investment bankers have reasons to emphasize bad news. Most notably they profit from the so-called yen-carry trade, an arcane but powerful investment strategy in which the well informed benefit from periodic bouts of weakness in the Japanese yen.
Economic ideology has also played an unfortunate role. Many economists, particularly right-wing think-tank types, are such staunch advocates of laissez-faire that they reflexively scorn Japan’s very different economic system, with its socialist medicine and ubiquitous government regulation. During the stock market bubble of the late 1980s, this mind-set abated but it came back after the crash.
Japanese trade negotiators noticed an almost magical sweetening in the mood in foreign capitals after the stock market crashed in 1990. Although previously there had been much envy of Japan abroad (and serious talk of protectionist measures), in the new circumstances American and European trade negotiators switched to feeling sorry for the “fallen giant.” Nothing if not fast learners, Japanese trade negotiators have been appealing for sympathy ever since.
The strategy seems to have been particularly effective in Washington. Believing that you shouldn’t kick a man when he is down, chivalrous American officials have largely given up pressing for the opening of Japan’s markets. Yet the great United States trade complaints of the late 1980s — concerning rice, financial services, cars and car components — were never remedied.
The “fallen giant” story has also even been useful to other East Asian nations, particularly in their trade diplomacy with the United States.
A striking instance of how the story has influenced American perceptions appears in “The Next 100 Years,” by the consultant George Friedman. In a chapter headed “China 2020: Paper Tiger,” Mr. Friedman argues that, just as Japan “failed” in the 1990s, China will soon have its comeuppance. Talk of this sort powerfully fosters complacency and confusion in Washington in the face of a United States-China trade relationship that is already arguably the most destructive in world history and certainly the most unbalanced.
Clearly the question of what has really happened to Japan is of first-order geopolitical importance. In a stunning refutation of American conventional wisdom, Japan has not missed a beat in building an ever more sophisticated industrial base. That this is not more obvious is a tribute in part to the fact that Japanese manufacturers have graduated to making so-called producers’ goods. These typically consist of advanced components or materials, or precision production equipment. They may be invisible to the consumer, yet without them the modern world literally would not exist. This sort of manufacturing, which is both highly capital-intensive and highly know-how-intensive, was virtually monopolized by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and constituted the essence of American economic leadership.
Japan’s achievement is all the more impressive for the fact that its major competitors — Germany, South Korea, Taiwan and, of course, China — have hardly been standing still. The world has gone through a rapid industrial revolution in the last two decades thanks to the “targeting” of manufacturing by many East Asian nations. Yet Japan’s trade surpluses have risen.
Japan should be held up as a model, not an admonition. If a nation can summon the will to pull together, it can turn even the most unpromising circumstances to advantage. Here Japan’s constant upgrading of its infrastructure is surely an inspiration. It is a strategy that often requires cooperation across a wide political front, but such cooperation has not been beyond the American political system in the past. The Hoover Dam, that iconic project of the Depression, required negotiations among seven states but somehow it was built — and it provided jobs for 16,000 people in the process. Nothing is stopping similar progress now — nothing, except political bickering.
Eamonn Fingleton is an author who predicted the Japanese financial crash of the 1990s; he is working on a book about the end of the American dream.