Why did Warren Buffett invest $6B+ in centuries-old Japanese trading houses?

Unfortunately there is no publication date but the meta tags in the sources and the dates of linked documents hint to ~1999.

Also, for people who don't have the context, check out the "Lost Decade": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan).

> The Lost Decade or the Lost 10 Years (失われた十年, Ushinawareta Jūnen) was a period of economic stagnation in Japan from about 1991 to 2001, caused by the Japanese asset price bubble's collapse in late 1991. From 1991 to 2003, the Japanese economy, as measured by GDP, grew only 1.14% annually, well below that of other industrialized nations.

Think of Modern Money Theory as this crazy theory that challenges our intuition but actually makes sense if you really understand it.

> there is apparently at least some circumstances where printing money doesn't lead to inflation

If everyone in the USA (and the world) decided tomorrow not to hold the USD any more, you'll have hyper-inflation in the matter of a few hours. Printing money is just one variable to inflation; and not really a very important one if you have lots of money flowing already in the economy.

When someone deposits money into their bank account, the bank isn't required to keep the full amount in a safe. Banks are actually allowed to lend part of the money without even asking anyone. When they do this, they create money out of nowhere and inflate the economy.

If someone deposits $1000, they can lend some percentage of that value to other people. Something like $500. That's newly created money that isn't backed up by anything and exists only as numbers in a database. It will only become real money when the debt is paid... However, modern economies seem to built around having as much debt as possible.

Printed currency is nothing compared to this.

Not printing enough money. Sometimes the problem is not that you’re not doing the right thing, it’s that you’re not doing enough of it. Look at housing supply and prices in the US and in Tokyo. At one end you have places with a system designed to come as close as possible to a ban on new housing like San Francisco, with their never ending escalation of house prices and rents. At the other end you have places like Houston with quite moderate rises. In the middle you have New York which isn’t as bad as San Francisco or Seattle which has actually seen prices fall over the last two years they’ve built so much. Way over beyond that you’ve got Tokyo growing 50% in population in two decades with flat house prices and rents.

From 2016

> As FT’s Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).” Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...

The only issue will be when Japan has an ungodly amount of old people with no money to take care of them because the gov spent it all. And no population to tax because they stopped having children.

And no goods or services because not enough people are providing them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation

http://larrysummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NABE-spee...