Identify how much spending you can postpone until next year.
Reflect if a deflationary spiral is even remotely likely.
None whatsoever.
> Identify how much spending you can postpone until next year.
Everything except for life's necessities.
> Reflect if a deflationary spiral is even remotely likely.
It isn't but it's an interesting thought experiment.
A world with a large deflation is probably a world in which all natural resources have been harvested and the only things that still flow freely are sunlight and rain.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi
You can say they have had net inflation if you pick your time range correctly, but the graph shows spurts of deflation followed by spurts of deparate inflation via QE that doesn't solve the deflation.
Google "Japan deflation" today and you'll get articles from yesterday describing how they are still trying to fight this problem.
Here's what Japan had:
1) Too much monetary expansion in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to bubbles in both real estate and the stock market.
2) When monetary expansion slowed down, they suffered the popping of both of those asset bubbles.
3) In response to that fake boom ending, they turned to accumulating debt.
4) That debt has led to protracted stagnation for ~20 years. Which has now led to currency debasement to devalue that debt, because it's consuming so much of their budget, and the the central government can no longer borrow from Japan's savers (because their savings rate is non-existent now).
There was deflation in Japan, caused by deflation of the asset bubbles.
There was no deflationary spiral as defined by the scaremongers.
Japanese banks should have failed, and debt holders should have been wiped out for making bad lending decisions.
Such things are painful but they are forgotten over time.
Instead continual debt increases and government boondoggles have made the economy dead for 20 years.
A resurrected corpse after some hardship is better than a zombie economy.
The computer and car industries (both manufacturing depreciating assets) seems to have managed over the past decade/century
I'm not sure about you, but I've always called that 'saving'
Hoarding is something like but not quite exactly the same as saving.
Which is a ridiculous argument because it's always true (or at least has been for 100+ years).
It's very easy to find safe investments with greater returns than inflation and it always has been, has it caused a hoarding problem?
Great returns come with great risk.
To then turn that upside down and say that saving makes things worse is only possible by using the word 'hoarding' as it conjures images of a fleeing deposed lord burying the family treasure in a field.
In reality, returning economies to health requires a stable or increasing rate of savings.
It also leads to bizarre outcomes where foolish pensioners invest in exotic and risky cash like instrument's like PIBS instead of 100+ year old investment trusts.