Saturday, August 3, 2013

Japan's Inflation

Over at one of the blogs I follow on Japan, they put out a piece today looking at the inflation numbers for that country that were released on July 26th.  Much was made about the +0.2% increase YoY (the first such increase in many months), signalling perhaps that Abenomics is getting its desired result.  But, digging into the numbers a bit, if you back out energy and food, the number becomes -0.2% - in other words, the inflation that is happening is more of the cost push variety (i.e., the weaker yen is causing manufacturing costs to go up) rather than demand pull (i.e., consumers are becoming more active).  They want the latter, which is somehow considered the good type because it implies higher wages, but are setting themselves up for a whole lot of the former, which correlates to stagflation or something worse.

Broken Money

The subtitle is Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better , and the author is Lyn Alden (2023). I feel like I hav...