“Princes of the Yen” 

“Princes of the Yen” is currently listed for $200 on Amazon. It’s Richard Werner’s book—the same economist Tucker Carlson recently interviewed about the collapse of Japan’s once-miraculous economy.

Apparently, someone translated the book from Japanese and is now charging that outrageous price. Thankfully, someone else created a documentary based on the book, and I watched that.

What struck me most was this: After Mao died, the new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping went to Japan seeking the secret sauce behind their economic miracle. The Japanese shared it—their banking system.

It was a hybrid between free enterprise and central planning.

• Ingredient One: Set up many small banks. Small banks lend to small firms, and small firms are the engines of growth. This was the free-enterprise component.
• Ingredient Two: Central planning, euphemistically called “window guidance” by the bankers. Under this system, Japan’s central bank directed banks on which sectors to lend to, and how much. Once the destination was mapped out, free enterprise drove the vehicle.
• Ingredient Three: No lending for speculation—neither in stocks nor real estate.

China copied and pasted this system—and the rest, as we know, is history.

But then Japan abandoned it. Why? That’s a political story full of twists, and I haven’t fully digested it yet. But in short: the central bank wanted political reform, but a societal reforms only happen in response to crisis. So it engineered one. It removed the second and third ingredients—window guidance and the restriction on speculative lending.

A bubble began to inflate and grew massive. At its peak, the market price of gardens in central Tokyo equaled that of all real estate in California. Eventually, the bubble burst—and the crisis arrived.

Politics and money, it seems to me, are so deeply entangled that perhaps they are two sides of the same coin. You likely can’t understand one without understanding the other.