Word: japanized
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...lengthy productivity slump beginning in the early 1970s that created concern among economists such as Krugman. Low productivity growth explained much of what had gone wrong with the U.S. economy: stagnant wages, high inflation, ground lost to Japan. But what caused it? The most convincing explanation came from Northwestern University's Robert J. Gordon. In the early and mid-20th century, he argued, the U.S. benefited from a spectacular confluence of technological innovation involving electricity, the internal combustion engine, petrochemicals and communications. By the 1970s the economic impact of innovation in these fields had waned, and nothing came along...
...reassure the public that its financial system can withstand the global crisis, Japan is dusting off an expired law allowing the government to inject capital into the country's regional banks and other financial companies...
...Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa made the case for using public funds to stabilize the financial sector following similar moves by the U.S. and Europe. Japan's national banks are considered to be in much better shape than counterparts in the West. But after the recent failures of Yamato Life Insurance Co., one of the country's major insurers, and New City Residence Investment Corp. a real estate investment trust (REIT), government officials are pushing to reactivate the law as a precautionary measure. "Huge storms are coming to Japan from abroad," says Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan Securities Japan...
...government recapitalized and even nationalized some of its major banks after real estate and stock-market bubbles burst. The government says it currently plans to take a localized approach to intervention to make sure weaknesses it sees chiefly in regional banks don't develop into a systemic infection. Japan's regional banks don't appear to be facing an immediate crisis, say economists, but the government wants to be prepared. "It's a safety net for smaller institutions," says Takahide Kiuchi, chief economist at Nomura Securities...
...medium-term inflation problem of their own. What's tricky is that the alternative is also a serious possibility: if household spending and business investment drop sharply and exports don't take up the slack, Europe could be confronted with deflation of the sort that took hold in Japan in the 1990s. "We're somewhere between the two," says Riches-Flores of Société Générale...