With that in mind, I'd like to update the chart I introduced last April.
Having overcome the Lehman Shock, it appears as though the economy is back on track for growth.
Meanwhile, the GDP deflator looks like this. We can see that deflation has continued for some time now.
Because of this situation, interest rates remain low.
By the way, I was just thinking, wouldn't it be a big deal if deflation were to end and long-term interest rates rose? If nominal growth were to reach around 3% and long-term interest rates also rose by around 500%, Japan would end up using up most of its tax revenue just on government bond yields. If GDP is around 3 trillion yen, then 15% growth would add around 6 trillion yen. If 27% of that were taxes, then tax revenue would increase by XNUMX trillion yen. But interest payments would increase by XNUMX trillion yen... Well, that's (I'll refrain from saying more).
Nice to meet you. Secular stagnation like Japan's was basically predicted by Keynes in his General Theory (around chapter 15, I think) as one of the scenarios that advanced capitalist societies will end up in. Keynes said that in such a society, the schedule of marginal efficiency will continue to decline and market interest rates will remain extremely low, resulting in the extinction of interest-earners, and some new form of society will be born, but the reality is not like that. This is because today is a highly open economy, unlike Keynes' time. Nowadays, people can freely invest across borders in search of higher market interest rates, and even in a secularly stagnant economy like Japan, they can expect to live on interest rates even more. I think that the evolution of a series of IT, including OpenID, and the businesses and systems surrounding IT, is also one tool that supports the open economy. I also watched your interview with Poland's WP and this feeling was strengthened. I do not want to criticize the idea of OpenID itself, but I have strong concerns about the radical reforms in the financial market that have been carried out in the current highly open economy, especially in the United States, over the past 35 years. Thanks to the open economy, the situation in the world has already deviated quite far from what Keynes predicted, but if liberalization continues further, the informationization of capital will progress, and I feel a little scared that we will now see an economic situation where collectivization through the monopoly of capital is what Marx predicted in Das Kapital, and a social situation where information is centralized by collectivized monopoly capital is what Orwell predicted in 1984.