日本债务危机终于来了吗？日元触及40年低点

Economists sometimes say that there are four kinds of economies: developed, undeveloped, Argentina, and Japan. The latter of which has spent most of the past three decades defying economic gravity by printing and borrowing absurd amounts of money without inviting too much inflation or pushback from the bond markets. However, as Japan's economy has started to look more normal, the problems you'd expect from such a heavily indebted economy have materialized, including rising borrowing costs and depreciated currency.

With the Japanese yen now touching a 40-year low earlier this week. So, in this video, we're going to explain what's gone wrong for the Japanese economy and explain why even if an acute crisis still looks unlikely, it's hard to see things getting better. Ever wondered who's really funding the news you read? Well, luckily you don't have to wonder with TLDR, as every year we share a detailed breakdown of our revenue, costs, and profitability.

Find out who's funding us and if we made a profit last year by watching the video linked in the description. So, let's start by explaining how Japan got itself into this predicament in the first place. After decades of rapid economic growth, in the 1990s Japan suffered from a series of economic shocks in quick succession. Property prices and the stock market essentially collapsed and Japan's economy entered a period of stagnation with both growth and inflation falling close to zero.

In an attempt to get the economy moving again, Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan or BOJ, bought up billions of yen's worth of government bonds, essentially printing money and giving it to the government to spend. Now, usually you would expect that printing lots of money would lead to inflation, and this was sort of the aim. Unfortunately for the BOJ, this didn't really happen. Both Japan's inflation rate and its growth rate stuck stubbornly close to zero, while the Japanese government's debt burden ballooned to more than 200% of GDP, one of the highest in the world.

That was until early 2022, when the inflationary shock that swept across the world pushed Japan's annual inflation rate above 2% for the first time in nearly a decade. Originally, there was some hope that this external shock might bring the Japanese economy back to normality by triggering what's known as a wage-price spiral. For context, a wage-price spiral is what happens when workers start demanding higher wages to compensate for higher prices, which would mean more spending power for Japanese households and therefore higher prices, etc., etc.

In the best-case scenario, this sort of wage-price spiral would essentially lift Japan's baseline inflation rate up from basically zero to nearer 2%, which is the Bank of Japan's target. In the best best-case scenario, this slightly higher inflation rate will also drive economic growth by encouraging Japanese households to spend money instead of saving it and letting inflation eat away at its real value. Unfortun