And under those conditions, monetary policy proved just as ineffective as Keynes had said it was in the 1930s. The Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Fed, could and did increase the monetary base. But the extra yen were hoarded, not spent. The only consumer durable goods selling well, some Japanese economists told me at the time, were safes. In fact, the Bank of Japan found itself unable even to increase the money supply as much as it wanted. It pushed vast quantities of cash into circulation, but broader measures of the money supply grew very little. An economic recovery finally began a couple of years ago, driven by a revival of business investment to take advantage of new technological opportunities. But monetary policy never was able to get any traction.
In effect, Japan in the Nineties offered a fresh opportunity to test the views of Friedman and Keynes regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. And the results clearly supported Keynes’s pessimism rather than Friedman’s optimism.
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