Our friend Ramsey Su just asked what Haruhiko Kuroda and Shinzo Abe are going to do now in light of the strong yen (aside from perhaps doing the honorable thing). Isn’t it time to just “wipe out some debt with the stroke of a pen”?
The modern Samurai futon!
We will return to that question further below, but first a few words on the new Samurai futon. Apparently the Japanese are becoming more than a little antsy about Kuroda-san’s negative interest rate policy (and the threats of more of the same coming down the pike). Bloomberg informs us of the latest developments in this saga: “Manga Worker Stuffs Cash in Futon to Flee Japan’s Negative Rates”:
When the Bank of Japan unexpectedly announced negative interest-rate policies in January, the first thing Tomomi Sato did was withdraw a 10th of the money in her bank account and stash it at home.
“It made me think of bank runs and shutdowns like I’ve heard there were in the past,” said the 30-something assistant to manga comic artists, who commutes for two hours from a small apartment in Tokyo’s suburbs. “Eventually, I feel like they’ll start charging me to keep my money there. When I think about that, I begin to worry.”
Sato is emblematic of a challenge facing the central bank that rates below zero only deepened: average Japanese aren’t feeling the benefits of more than three years of extraordinary monetary stimulus, and cash withdrawals suggest they are losing faith. About 40 trillion yen ($360 billion) has piled up in homes across Japan, according to a Dai-ichi Life Research Institute estimate — equivalent to about 8 percent of gross domestic product. That’s money banks could be lending on or using to buy bonds.
(emphasis added)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
