maybe by printing Yen, they could drive down the exchange rate, helping Japan's exports.
According to the US Economic Report of the President, using concepts comparable to those used in the US, Japanese unemployment is pretty low by US standards (it was 4.8% in 2009-10). (It recently rose steeply, after some recovery during the 2000s, due to the global financial crisis.) Maybe there isn't enough "labor slack" for a big effort without a big inflationary impulse. In any event, the question is whether the printed Yen can mobilize the unemployed labor to do the earthquake/tsunami/nuke-related jobs. It may be hard to find ones with the right skills. I really don't know the situation in labor-power markets in Japan. Is there anyone out there in pen-land who does? On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 4:19 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: >> raghu quoted: >>> Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among >>> other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of >>> new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan >>> can raise it. ... >> >> Printing Yen threatens to cause inflation, especially when the >> aftermath and the aftershocks of earthquake are restricting supply. On >> the other hand, if the '"money" is a gift of US$, that wouldn't cause >> inflation in Japan (or the US). >> >> still the article was useful. > > > >From what I understand, the Japanese economy has been in > near-depression for the last 2 decades i.e. there is (or at least was) > a substantial slack in resource utilization. I agree that if it makes > sense to print yen now, it should have made even more sense to do so > before the earthquake, but such are the games that have to be played > to maintain our monetary illusions.. > -raghu. > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
