The motivating factor?  this article in Politico:
President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.
The president’s plan, which [...]

Hong Kong’s leader Donald Tsang has come out with a scathing criticism of U.S. monetary policy, comparing it to Japan’s which he believes contributed to 1997’s Asian crisis. This is the most direct and strident criticism of the U.S. Federal reserve’s monetary policy from a major international politician yet.
Bloomberg reports:
The Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping [...]

In the video below, Marshall Auerback gives a even-handed analysis of the parallels between the US and Japan on Fox Business with Brian Sullivan.
Demographic trends, GDP trends and deleveraging trends are all similar. But, Marshall goes further by pointing to the misallocation of fiscal resources, the emergence of crony capitalism and the likelihood of [...]

Andy Xie thinks the Fed is on an inflationary path.  Last month, he wrote an article in Caijing which says that ‘stagflation lite’ is the Federal Reserve’s preferred outcome. What’s interesting is his recent article about the need for China and Japan to join forces under an ASEAN umbrella, rejecting the APEC umbrella shared with [...]

The following is a re-print of the latest monthly newsletter from Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners, published with the express permission of the author. Visit www.arpllp.com to learn more about Absolute Return Partners. You can reach the firm by email at info@arpllp.com.
This post on taxes and budget deficits should remind one of three recent [...]

Several notable economists prognosticated on what Japan should do to get out of their malaise in the 1990s but none of them understood the problem or the options available to the sovereign government. They all gave poor advice. The way Japan recovered after that decade of poor economic outcomes was through fiscal policy. Monetary policy [...]

When I read Ed’s recent piece “Japan: stimulus without reform leads to a policy cul de sac,” I couldn’t help but think he is wrong about Japan.
Supporting aggregate demand
The problem is taxes. In Japan, taxes are too high relative to the desire for spending and savings. Policy makers need to stop taking so many yen [...]

This article by Peter Tasker, a well-regarded financial analyst in Asia, comes via the Financial Times (hat tip Marshall). He sees an enormous bubble forming in China – and parallels to Japan circa 1987:
Emerging markets, it seems, have had a good crisis. In contrast to the debt-ridden G7 economies, they have quickly resumed their growth [...]

If one wants to see what happens when you use stimulus to help keep zombie companies alive and to resist reform efforts, look no further than Japan. 
For twenty years now, Japan has been dealing with the consequences of a burst asset bubble in shares and property. And for twenty years, the body politic has [...]

Nouriel Roubini seems to think so. In remarks quoted via Bloomberg, he called the enormous increase in asset prices “the mother of all carry trades.”
Investors worldwide are borrowing dollars to buy assets including equities and commodities, fueling “huge” bubbles that may spark another financial crisis, said New York University professor Nouriel Roubini.
“We have the [...]