Real interest rates in Japan were on par with in the US in the mid-2000s [0], and only entered the negative range when the US began dropping interest rates to near 0 during the GFC [0].
The bigger issue in was the hangover of the 1990s Japanese bust which lead to larger players tightening their belts at the expense of smaller players [1]
The big players in Japan are also similarly old (usually 300-500 year old guilds converted into corporations/zaibatsus in the 19th century)
There is also a succession crisis brewing in plenty of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese businesses. One person in my network is leaving American Tech PE/VC to concentrate on buying out Korean and a Japanese companies facing issues around succession now - just like American SMEs businesses faced in the 1970s-2000s.
Ik people like to shoehorn the Japanese experience to extrapolate American and Western policy, but the Japanese economy is structured very differently from Western economies with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to opposed), welfare (highly supportive), inflation (keep it as low as possible), and state intervention (highly supportive).
The only developed countries that can safely be compared to the Japanese economy are South Korea and Taiwan (maybe Dirigisme-era France and Italy pre-1990s, but they had the benefits of the EC/EU which made stuff significantly different).
I recommend reading "The Japanese Economy" by Takatoshi Ito and Takeo Hoshi [2] and "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap [3]
[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?end=2013&lo...
[1] - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/01/03/national/execs-...
[2] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538244/the-japanese-economy/
[3] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
>with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to opposed)
Post-war, Japan (with the American occupation's "help") did what would be unthinkable to American businesses, taxing the personal wealth of company heads up to ~85% and purging them from their companies. This left much of Japan's industry essentially controlled by the government.
Furthermore, these are all texts that are expected reading in any upper level Asian Economics class.
> leading to a brief period of cheap and easy money that completely destroyed the remarkably solid and sustainable economy Japan had built post-war
The biggest cause was bad loan issues caused by lack of auditing and due dilligence. [0]
In that era, the BoJ would set a quota on loan origination (called a window guidance) that Japanese banks needed to meet (p.s. China used to do the same thing til 2015 which is a major reason for China's current real estate crisis)
The Plaza Accord would not have had as severe an impact if Japan's Window Guidance policy didn't incentivize business loans with minimal due diligence.
> Post-war ... purging them from their companies
And they completely reconstituted themselves in the 1950s by adopting the Keiretsu corporate structure where a single asset management firm controls all the broken off assets of the initial zaibatsu.
This is what Mitsui, Sumimito, Mitsubishi, Fuyo, etc did.
Take a look at NYT reporting about this from 1954 [1]
Japan also does not have a wealth tax.
> This left much of Japan's industry essentially controlled by the government
Japan always had a high amount of government intervention in it's economy.
MITI was the driver of Japanese industrial policy.
I recommend reading "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" (1982) by Chalmers Johnson to dig deeper into the history of interventionism in the Japanese model [2]
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While the Plaza Accord did have a significant impact on the Japanese economy, the recent politically driven "pop econ" Plaza Accord view needs to die [3]
Like anything else that's pop-anything, it's so broadstrokes that it's bordering on misinformation.
[0] - https://www.imes.boj.or.jp/research/papers/english/me19-s1-1...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1954/07/17/archives/japan-again-plan...
[2] - https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2791
[3] - https://www.imf.org/-/media/Websites/IMF/imported-flagship-i...
Not really.
There were similar works barely 20 years before Werner about the role MITI played in the Japanese miracle and how the US should emulate it (Chalmer Johnson's "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" played a significant role in seeding what became the CHIPS and IRA, as it was required reading in 80s and 90s era policy circles)
Werner's major contribution was his argument that the policies he ended up coining as QE could have resolved Japan's malaise in the 90s (and he absolutely was correct looking at Abe-era Japan's performance compared to before).
And Japan's planned economy is overstated, as Seong-ik Oh's recently published "Overseas Energy Investment of Korea and Japan" investigates
Survived nearly 1500 -> Nearly survived 1500
Kongo gumi still continued operating even though it went through a restructuring, so it's fair to say it's still the oldest company in the world.
Just it's no longer the oldest family business in the world - that ended when direct Kongo control of it ended, although I hear they still have a ceremonial involvement with the company.
So it depends on what you mean by “they”, the company with the old name Kongo Gumi is no longer in construction, but otherwise the company with the new name Shin Kongo is, as a subsidiary of another conglomerate.
Bloomberg also had an article https://archive.is/rLnnH
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamura_Shaji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
(Of course, since wiki page hasn’t been updated for the first, it might also have quietly passed into the ether)
[Cue yada yada the batman snowclone “live long enough”, eg you either die a batman or live long enough to become Batman)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military)]
[another source of hypernormie pro weirdos, from my personal anecdata, are psychiatrists, im guessing the sibboleth is the high neuroticism to __ ratio, which comes off as wisdom (after discounting for age).. weird pronormies would then be econs profs? This is prob why both trigger the So[Ha]Ri(veign/vian) Taleb lol]
Also should have replied to alephnerd in a more timely fashion
At one point I ran across a US book which noted that children of psychiatrists tend to wind up in treatment themselves, with the exception having been just after WWII (when the army's need for psychiatrists meant they retrained many people who had studied as regular GPs), and concluded that it may be a field many people pursue due to the attraction of self-diagnosis.
Had the Athenians been speaking to the Melians on the subject of signal/call-sign analysis, would they have said "the boring are anonymous in their masses for they can, while the novel leak identity as they must"?
(Novelty not referring to semantic goodness; I'm afraid just with the purely syntactic category of "number* of distinct code-points employed" my 'hand' would be extremal, both here and in Persia)
* I think I owe the notion to you that as long as one has been given summation, recovering multilinearity from linear elements is easy?
I feel like the core of the company – led as a family business, earning real money – would be lost if it was suddenly state-supported, with the inevitable meddling to go with it.
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The big problem with these temples is not religion it’s deforestation. The spine is made of old growth timber. So some of these temples survived over a thousand years until the central pillars were deemed unsound and needed to be replaced. Problem is that the new pillars are estimated to need replacement again in 400 years. They are made of less sturdy stuff.
Also AFAIK most of these constructions are made of wood, which also mean they need to be rebuilt over time. I think I also remember it is even part of the Buddhist tradition (at least for temples), a way to emphasis the impermanence of things.
See for instance this long but fascinating video on one of the most famous temple of Kyoto: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o
Found another reference, but for a shrine: [2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shri...
We shouldn't assume that all of the world's faiths follow the tradition of building temples as permanent monuments of stone and gold.
- the more ornate, the better
- unlike palaces, every town needs at least one, and if you're polytheistic, so much the better
- extremely price-insensitive clients who are content to wait generations
- you can probably easily bulldoze both structures and local opinions that get in the way of construction because you're building for a cause everyone's supposed to worship
The organization has existed and has had a need to find funding for it's activities. Since the question was about 'state' run entities, the goal of "making a profit" seemed not particular salient.
Honestly, I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state.
That is not as contentious, because it's basically autocephalous/self governing.
It's always been a couple dozen loners in the Sinai peninsula maintaining self sufficiency, which is why I don't find it a good example - as there are plenty of similarly old and continuous organizations, but never truly scaled.