Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph:
As you may have seen, Japan’s public debt has hit one trillion quadrillion yen. That is roughly $10 trillion. It will reach 247pc of GDP this year (IMF data).
No problem. Where there is a will, there is a solution to almost everything. Let the Bank of Japan buy a nice fat chunk of this debt, heap the certificates in a pile on Nichigin Dori St in Tokyo, and set fire to it. That part of the debt will simply disappear.
You could do it as an electronic accounting adjustment in ten seconds. Or if you want preserve appearances, you could switch the debt into zero-coupon bonds with a maturity of eternity, and leave them in a drawer for Martians to discover when Mankind is long gone.
Shocking, yes. Depraved, not really.
It also doable, and is in fact being done right before our eyes. That is what Abenomics is all about. It is what Takahashi Korekiyo did in the early 1930s, and it is what the Bank of England is likely to do here (while denying it), and the Fed may well do in America.
Japan’s QE will never be fully unwound. Nor should it be. If a country can eliminate a large chunk of unsustainable debt without setting off an inflation spiral, or a currency crash, or the bubonic plague, there has to be a very strong reason not to do it. I have yet hear such a reason. Though I have heard much tut-tutting, Austro-outrage, and a great deal of pedantry.
It is also what the Romans did time and again over the course of the late empire, though less efficiently, since they did indeed inflate. And no, even that was not fatal. The Roman Empire did not collapse because of metal debasement. It revived magnificently under the Antinones. As Gibbon discovered deep into his opus — and too late to change his title — the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took an awfully long time, to the point where the concept is meaningless.
Money is hugely important, but also ultimately trivial. The productive forces of a society are what matter in the end....MORE
