일본의 경제 흥망성쇠: 교훈

### 일본 경제력의 흥망성쇠: 엔화 붕괴와 그 교훈이 우리에게 주는 영향
* 💴 현재 일본 엔화는 미국 달러 대비 **38년 만에 최저치**를 기록하고 있으며, 우호적인 환율로 인해 일본을 방문하는 **미국인 관광객이 급증**하고 있습니다.
* 🇯🇵 1980년대에 일본 경제는 급격한 성장을 이루며 **땅값이 치솟고 일본 기업들이 기술 및 제조 분야에서 글로벌 리더**로 부상했습니다.
* 📉 1985년 플라자 합의로 일본은 규제를 완화하고 **엔화를 강세로 전환**하여 수출 경쟁력을 떨어뜨리고 경기 침체 압력으로 이어졌습니다.
* 🎈 규제 완화와 느슨한 통화 정책으로 인해 일본에서는 **주가가 지속 불가능한 수준까지 치솟는 등 대규모 자산 거품**이 발생했습니다.
* 1989년 버블이 붕괴되면서 경제 성장 정체, 디플레이션, 금융 불안으로 특징지어지는 일본의 **'잃어버린 10년'**이 시작되었습니다.
* 👵 세계에서 가장 높은 기대 수명과 가장 낮은 출산율을 자랑하는 일본의 인구 고령화는 **경제의 미래에 큰 도전**이 되고 있습니다.
* 📈 일본은행은 최근 **17년 만에 처음으로 금리를 인상**하며 오랜 마이너스 금리 정책에서 벗어났습니다.
* 🏦 경제학자들은 일본의 경험에서 얻은 교훈으로 **긴축 통화 정책 채택, 규제 감독 강화, 수출 의존에서 벗어난 경제 다각화의 중요성**을 꼽습니다.

엔화가 38년 만에 최저치를 기록하며 여행 및 세계 경제에 영향을 미치고 있는 일본의 엔화 약세로 인해 더 많은 미국 여행객이 일본을 찾고 있습니다.

the Japanese yen is now trading at a 38-year low against the US dollar. That's why the number of Americans coming to Japan has skyrocketed, with more than 900,000 people coming in the first 5 months of 2024 alone, a 17.4% increase from last year. That's also why you might be seeing Japan everywhere on social media right now. The weakened Yen has made Japan an even more attractive place to visit because $1 will now get you roughly 160 Yen, and the last time that was the case was around May of 1986, or almost 40 years ago. Everyone is trying to get a piece of Japan right now. But what's interesting is that not that long ago in the 80s, it was Japan that was buying the United States. Some of the things Japan bought included the famous Pebble Beach Golf Resort in California, the Firestone Tire Company. Japan's Sony Corporation was able to buy CBS records, Columbia pictures, MGM, United Artists, the IC Chrysler Building in New York City.

and Universal Studios Japan's economy got so big that people started to worry. Japanese investors were buying too much of everything. Japan got really close to overtaking the US economy, and how they were able to do all that is a super interesting story. One of the things that made this possible is land values in Japan started to explode. A small office space in the district of Ginza, for example, sold for 1.5 million million for 1 square meter. And that works out to a little over [Music] $139,000 per square foot. Just for comparison, last year the US national average was about $23 a square foot. But a more apples-to-apples comparison would be an area in San Francisco, which right now is valued at $5,450 a square foot, which is outrageous but still a far cry away from $139,000. That also meant the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was hypothetically worth about $852 billion, which at the time was worth more than the entire real estate of California. It was said that Japan's

land value and the office spaces in it in the most expensive District. The District of Ginza were valued at $5.1 trillion, which was about the size of Japan's entire GDP in 1989. And remember, that's for a country that's 26 times smaller than the United States. And that's just real estate. Japan's stock market was worth more than the entire value of US real estate times 4. The Japanese economy was on such a role that in the year 1995, the Chicago Tribune wrote Japan may still surpass the United States to become a leading economic power by the year 2000. And that's not that long ago, but that didn't end up happening. Instead, what happened was arguably one of the biggest bubbles to ever pop in economic history. So in today's video, I want to show you how Japan almost took over the entire world, why they didn't, and how the Yen has been collapsing over the last few decades, and what we can learn from it, and how all of this affects us.

with that said, let's get into it. Hi, my name is Andre J. Hope you're doing well. Come for the finance and stay for macroeconomic history. So, to understand Japan and the decline of the Yen, we have to rewind and talk about how Japan became so powerful. Because after World War II, Japan experienced something people call the economic miracle. And how the world saw Japan changed a lot in the 1950s. For example, if someone picked something up and they saw it was made in Japan, they would have automatically assumed it was bad quality. And you probably knew that, but maybe you forgot, unless you recently watched Back to the Future. No wonder this sea fail, it says. Made in Japan. What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. Unbelievable. That's because Japan made a lot of progress by the time of Marty's 1985. And that was thanks to Tak Henry Saku. Ultra low interest rates. Between the 1950s to the 1980s, Japan's economy grew like crazy. And Japan became an

extremely wealthy country. Japan invested into its own growth, focusing on creating high tech like VCRs, the Walkman, companies like Sony, Honda, and all their super reliable cars started to transform the global economy. Everyone wanted to own a product from Japan. By the 1980s, Made in Japan was associated with high-quality, cutting-edge technology that was actually affordable. And one of the biggest reasons for this change in perception is because the Central Bank of Japan was strategically keeping the Yen weak. A weak Yen made Japanese goods cheaper for other countries to buy. And when stronger currencies were buying, Japanese companies could convert those foreign profits like US dollars for a lot more Yen. And that created a lot of wealth, especially for the companies making all that stuff. And that's why the Japanese stock market went way up, which also resulted in full employment and good wage increases. Japan's economy was on a roll. But then the president of the US, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan the actor, Ronald Reagan, decided to devalue the dollar in order to make the US more

competitive as well. And that was the birth of something called The Plaza Accord because Jesus also had a Honda for he did not speak of his own accord. Just kidding, seeing if you're still awake. Now the G5 Nations, which included Japan, the United States, the UK, France, and Germany, all got together to agree to this Plaza Accord. And the goal was to devalue the US dollar. And one of the ways they did that was by forcing Japan to deregulate in order to stimulate private sector growth. Now, whenever you hear the word deregulation, just remember that investors will probably be printing tendies soon, AKA they're going to make a lot of money. But it can also mean that if people are not careful, it's one of the special ingredients for creating an economic bubble. Because what deregulation eventually did was it made the Yen so strong that it made Japan less competitive on the international market. Their products became more expensive in relation to other currencies. So Japan started to make less money. And that created recessionary.

pressures for Japan. So, to avoid a possible recession, Japan focused on strengthening its domestic economy. In other words, they wanted to make sure that people had an opportunity to make more money at home since they were making less money overseas. And the way they did that was by increasing the marketability of Securities by creating as many investors as possible. And the way they did that was by adopting what's called a loose monetary policy and expanding credit. Japan made it really cheap to borrow money by dropping the discount rate from 5% in 1985 to 2 1/2% by 1987. The amount of money in the system, as measured by M3, went up by 141% from 1980 to 1990. And with all this money in the system and easy access to cheap credit and low-interest rates, meant people started to leverage or borrow money so that they could invest. And that's what created a giant bubble. I realize it's kind of complicated so if I put you to sleep here's a visual analogy.

of what the Plaza Accord really did. The Japan hey, look what I found more pancakes. Let's speed it up. Pancake, pancake, eat little buddy, eat, eat. [Music] Eat. You get the idea. It created a peak for Japan's economy. If you wanted to make money fast, you had to invest your money in the market, and it was in the market where you could not lose. Let me just show you how thick some of these pancakes were because from the year 1981 to 1991, whenever a company would launch or IPO, the first day's average returns in that 10-year span was 32%. Remember, the stock market today, like right now, returns anywhere between 7 to 10% per year on average, not 32% every time a company IPOs for 10 years straight. So people started buying blindly. In 1987, for example, literally blindly, as many as 10 million people applied to buy shares in a telecom stock before even knowing what the valuation would have been. That stock went up 200

times price to earnings ratio and was valued at $376 billion. Which, at the time, meant that one company was worth more than Germany's and Hong Kong's entire stock markets combined. Stock prices started to go up three times faster than corporate profits. Some stocks started to trade between 100 to 400 times price to earnings ratios. But then it all reached a peak in 1989. The Japanese stock market hit 225 times PE on average, and that's really high when you remember a healthy PE should be 10 times less than what it was. By comparison, the highest the US market ever reached during the financial crisis was roughly half of that. The Japanese stock market got so big it was worth about half of the world's entire stock market, about $4 trillion. And the interesting part about it was that it wasn't just a bubble created by ordinary people and their greed. It was hugely contributed by corporations that adopted a mentality economists like to call Tina, which stands for there is no alternative. It means companies were making more money from the capital gains on their

real estate and stock holdings than they were from their actual business, and that forced a lot of them to continue borrowing and buying more. It's estimated that about 38% of real estate was bought by corporations, and by 1980, about 2/3 of the entire stock market was owned by corporations. Because the Plaza Accord focused on deregulation, a lot of the speculation that fueled all of this growth was funded by these unregulated shadow banks. So eventually, the party had to come to an end. When the property values collapsed, when the stock market bubble popped in the early 1990s, the Central Bank of Japan had to step in and stop the bleeding. The way they did that was by slashing interest rates to nearly zero. The Bank of Japan started to inject money into its failing banks, which created zombie companies that could not repay their debt, and they had no money for capital investment. The reason Japan didn't let them fail is because they didn't want businesses to close and for people to lose their jobs.

so they continued to pump money into the economy, but it was too little too late. The trust was lost, and this period of time became known as The Lost decade. Now if you look at Japan's stock market, you'll see that it actually lasted for three. It was three loss decades because it wasn't until recently that Japan's stock market recovered to the same level that it was way back in 1989. Money was leaving Japan because there was no reason to park your money in a stock market that wasn't performing, and the safe option, which was the bond market, wasn't that attractive either because interest rates were still extremely low. At the same time, this was happening though, China's economy was starting to do some crazy things. China was starting to allow companies to relocate production to their factories, and that made Japan's economy even worse. That's because China is a lot more competitive in terms of labor cost. It's a lot lower than anywhere in the world, and although some companies from Japan took advantage of this cheaper Chinese labor, it still wasn't enough between

1990 and 2003, 212,000 companies went bankrupt. In the same period, the stock market dropped by 80%, land prices in the major cities fell by up to 84%. When all was said and done, it's estimated that the Lost Decades cost Japan 17 million jobs and created financial instability and depression among the Japanese population. The Lost Decades of Japan created something called stagflation, which is where you have inflation or rising prices while everything else is stagnant or stays still, like people's incomes. So, to stimulate the economy, the Bank of Japan dropped interest rates to near zero to stimulate borrowing and spending. But that didn't end up saving Japan; instead, this period of stagflation extended into the 2000s, and it forced the Central Bank of Japan to do something even more extreme. In 2016, the Central Bank of Japan dropped the key interest rate to negative 0.1%. Now, hold on a minute, negative interest rates. Does that mean that people then get paid to take out a

loan no, but that'd be cool though. Instead, the negative interest rate was targeted directly at the commercial Banks of Japan. The idea was if it cost a bank money to hold their customer deposits every month, they would want to hold as least amount of money as possible. It was a way of not just encouraging but forcing those Banks to lend out that money as much as possible. It was a way for the papa Bank, the Central Bank of Japan, to tell the baby Banks, the commercial banks, that hey, we have to artificially stimulate borrowing and spending. Quantitative easing is the more technical word for it in economics, and the Bank of Japan wasn't the only one doing it. Before the Bank of Japan adopted negative interest rates in 2016, it was the Danish Central Bank that set negative rates in 2012. Then the European Central Bank did it in 2014 to fight against deflation, and then later that year the Swiss National Bank did it to prevent excessive appreciation of the Swiss frank. And then in 2015, Sweden's

Central Bank did it to boost inflation and economic growth, but here's the thing: it still didn't really work because Japan has one major problem: their aging population. Japan has one of the highest life expectancy rates in the world and one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Japan has one of the fastest declining populations in the world. From the current 124 million, the number is expected to drop below 100 million by 2056. By 2100, the population will likely be half of what it is now. According to the World Economic Forum, as many as one in 10 people in Japan are over the age of 80. Japan's workforce is getting smaller. That puts a strain on its economic growth because the more old people you have that are not working, it means higher health care and pension costs, and that makes it harder for the Bank of Japan to justify increasing interest rates when the population is already having a hard time. That's why rates were negative for 8 years straight. The Bank of Japan just raised interest.

rates in 2024, which was the first rate increase in 17 long years. Well, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is raising interest rates for the first time in 177 years today, making it the last major central bank to exit the world's negative raid policy. The question is, how does all of this tie into the collapsing Yen and the strength of the US dollar? So typically, the Yen goes up in value when people are worried of a recession happening, but so far we've seen the opposite because the US economy has been really strong, even though we have high interest rates, which has also had the effect of attracting a lot of money into the US economy, which has helped boost the strength of the US dollar and weakened the Yen. Japan right now is criticized for not doing enough to convince people to park their money in the Yen since rates are still close to basically zero, which means there's no incentive to. And according to Sachs, the outlook for the Yen is weak for at least a little while longer. Just remember that.

how strong a money or a currency is depends a lot on the central bank's interest rate. The more expensive it is to borrow money, the more valuable it tends to be, and the cheaper it is to borrow it, the less valuable it tends to be. Right now, the US dollar is pretty expensive to borrow at 52%, whereas the yen is really cheap. But looking back at history, my personal question is: what were the lessons that we learned? What could we have done differently to prevent the Lost Decades of Japan? And it turns out there's actually three lessons that economists have learned that could have maybe prevented or lessened the effects of it. First, the Bank of Japan should have adopted a tighter monetary policy sooner, meaning they should have been afraid to increase interest rates and make it more expensive for corporations to speculate on real estate the way they did. Two, if Japan had stronger regulatory oversight over its financial institutions, it would have really lessened the sketchy lending practices of Shadow Banks. And if they restructured

the NPLs or non-performing loans of the banks that failed, they would have really restored the confidence of investors to start borrowing and investing money again. And three, if Japan's economy wasn't so initially dependent on exports from the beginning, if it was a little more diversified towards the domestic side of things, then the strength or the weakness of the Yen maybe wouldn't have mattered as much to the Japanese economy. So those three things could have probably lessened or even prevented the effects of the Lost Decade. Now, if you made it this far into the video, here's my personal opinion of the weaker Yen and how it all affects us. I visited Japan earlier this year, and without any kind of expectation, it became my favorite place that I've ever been to, especially Tokyo and Kyoto. I just love the food, the culture, and the people. Everything was clean, super respectful. I felt safe, and it was just incredible. I'm super excited to actually go back, probably sometime in October. And to top it off

everything was insanely cheap because of how strong the US dollar is against the Yen. So, if you're planning on traveling overseas, right now is arguably the best time in 38 years to visit Japan. So, if you do plan on going, please be respectful, stay safe, have fun, and as always, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Smash the like button, subscribe if you haven't already, don't forget to grab your free stocks. Links are down below. Go track them automatically with a spreadsheet. Link Down Below in my patreon. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'd love to see you back here next week. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

Why The Japanese Yen Is Collapsing (And How This Affects You)

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Andrei Jikh

일본 엔화가 미국 달러 대비 38년 만에 최저치를 기록하면서 일본을 방문하는 미국인 관광객이 크게 증가하고 있습니다.

1980년대에 일본 경제는 호황을 누리며 미국에 대한 대규모 투자가 이루어지고 땅값이 치솟았습니다.

일본 경제는 미국을 능가하는 궤도에 올랐지만 결국 역사상 가장 큰 경제 버블에 직면하여 급격한 쇠퇴를 겪게 됩니다.

일본 경제의 부상과 엔화 가치 하락

제2차 세계대전 이후 일본의 경제 기적은 빠른 성장과 고품질의 저렴한 제품에 대한 강력한 글로벌 명성으로 이어졌습니다.

일본 중앙은행의 전략적인 엔화 약세는 다른 나라에서 일본 제품을 더 저렴하게 구매할 수 있게 했고 일본 기업의 부와 성공을 이끌었습니다.

그러나 미국 달러의 평가 절하를 목표로 한 플라자 합의는 일본의 규제 완화와 엔화 강세로 이어져 일본 제품의 경쟁력을 떨어뜨리고 경제 침체를 초래했습니다.

일본의 경제 전략과 플라자 합의의 영향

일본은 느슨한 통화 정책을 시행하고 신용을 확대하여 국내 경제를 강화하고 해외 수입 의존도를 낮추는 것을 목표로 했습니다.

이로 인해 통화 공급이 크게 증가하고 차입이 급증하여 결국 거대한 경제 거품이 형성되었습니다.

버블의 특징은 주가 급등으로, 일부 종목은 수익 대비 매우 높은 가격으로 거래되어 1989년 정점을 찍고 전 세계 주식 시장의 절반에 해당하는 주식 시장 가치를 기록했습니다.

1990년부터 2000년대 초반까지 일본 경제는 주식 시장이 80% 하락하고 주요 도시의 땅값이 최대 84%까지 하락하는 등 큰 어려움을 겪었습니다.

스태그플레이션 기간 동안 일본은행은 대출과 소비를 촉진하기 위해 금리를 제로에 가까운 수준으로 낮췄습니다.

2016년에는 중앙은행이 투자를 장려하기 위해 기준금리를 마이너스 0.

1%로 낮추는 등 더욱 극단적인 조치를 취했습니다.

마이너스 금리가 일본 경제에 미치는 영향

마이너스 금리는 일본의 상업 은행에서 대출과 소비를 촉진하기 위해 사용되었습니다.

그러나 일본의 고령화와 인구 감소로 인해 이 전략은 효과가 없었고, 8년 연속 마이너스 금리가 이어졌습니다.

최근 일본은행이 17년 만에 금리를 인상하기로 결정한 것은 엔화 약세 전망에 대한 비판이 제기되면서 엔화와 미국 달러에 상당한 영향을 미쳤습니다.

중앙은행 정책이 통화 강세에 미치는 영향

현재 미국 달러는 52%로 대출 비용이 비싼 반면, 엔화는 매우 저렴하여 각 통화 가치에 영향을 미치고 있습니다.

일본의 잃어버린 10년에서 얻은 교훈은 더 긴축적인 통화 정책, 더 강력한 규제 감독, 더 다각화된 경제의 필요성 등입니다.

엔화 약세로 일본 여행이 놀라울 정도로 저렴해지면서 38년 만에 가장 좋은 여행 시기가 되었습니다.