I think you two should kiss and make up. When all is said and done, it's your intellect which is tripping you up - it's like going around a golf course with only a putter. Find the common sense between you and you'll find your full set of clubs, otherwise it's a flipping long game of grazy golf! The intellect was the last human faculty to be created - it's essentially your information technology. And we all know that IT can be misused and over-programmed. Use it properly and in proportion to your other faculties!
By investing 25% of social pension funds in equities, Japan has created the ultimate bubble, one completely unsustainable and affecting the to-be most massive currency depreciation ever for a G7 economy. Japan is now locked into permanent QE. It's truly absurd. It's borderline feudal. Japan has provided a decent life for its aging and declining population by discouraging hedonistic consumption. Without natural resources or a growing workforce, and with the world's most profound primary energy deficit, Japan has no prospects whatsoever for real economic growth. The normal justifications for Keynesian expansionism do not hold in Japan. Here, Krugman is wrong.
You obviously haven't been paying attention. When spend and borrow doesn't work, it's because it wasn't large enough. We need moar printing. Moar, I tell you.
There is an expression: "when the dentists get in, get out." When the BOJ codified 25% of SS funds into Equities, saying it needed to "improve returns," this was the "dentists" piling in and sets in motion calling the top of real economic growth in Japan. Growth requires debt financing as well as Equity, and pension investments in bonds are an efficient allocation of all capital as they free other capital to see a higher risk-reward ratio. Japan will now find it can't finance its government, that it can't (sales) tax ordinary folks into poverty to pay for the subsidy to Equities, so it must continue to inflate. I remember when the Euro first traded at dollar parity and how no one could ever foresee 1.30. While the Yen can go anywhere, and I don't trade it or make recommendations, in terms of the macro picture I find it hard to "buy and hold."
It comes to something when an economy thinks it can depend on a turbocharger when the engine's bust. I think they need to do a few recalls on this particular model - it seems events in their car industry are a good mirror of the larger picture. Didn't Toyota have to recall 6 million or so cars this year?
I thought bankruptcies were part of capitalism. You know all that creative destruction stuff? In general, I am really not into this cherry-picking of data and charts. I could offer you a few of my own, but it's difficult to draw conclusions.
Awwwww, how quickly you have gone from "hard-earned reputation" and "expert" (even if I was just pretending to be one) to "fool", "moron" and "idiot"... What a fall from grace it's been for me!