Normalization
Ichiro Suzuki For Japan it’s been a long, long three decades and a half of sometimes cozy but mostly painful experiences. Since the burst of the infamous Japan Bubble, which has already secured its place in history firmly, the Japanese economy struggled immensely, in an attempt to shed its excesses from the 1980s, cleaning up the banking system and fitting its structure to the post-deflation Japan as well as modernizing itself through digitalization. What needed to be done ha
Jun 206 min read
Rise of Asian Markets
Ichiro Suzuki The Asian ‘emerging’ markets are on a tear lately. They are neither China nor India. Instead, they are South Korea and Taiwan. These two countries are still categorized as emerging markets in spite of per capita income that has surpassed Japan. Their currency control confines them in the EM ranks. It’s the policy of index compilers, most notably Morgan Stanley Capital International. Free flow of capital matters, since it ensures exiting out of the country any ti
Jun 95 min read
Toyota’s Sin
Ichiro Suzuki On the table of per capita income, Japan ranked 22nd in 2023 among the 38 OECD countries, down from near the top at the turn of the 21st century. In fact, per capita GDP hasn’t change much for Japanese from a quarter century ago. Mired in mild deflation, the Japanese economy grew little for two decades. In the last several years, size of the economy and income were adversely affected by a sharp fall of the Japanese yen against not only the U.S. dollar but also m
Jun 95 min read