>
> Well, Doug said that Japan confirms Marx rather than Keynes.
I didn't catch this. Doug, would you repost your comments?
> Isn't there something more fundamental going on, namely
> competition between nations based on the production of automobiles,
> computers, and capital goods such as machine tools? In the world
capitalist
> economy, there are winner nations and loser nations just as within a
> capitalist economy there are success stories like Bill Gates and loser
> stories.
Well, I was looking at it in terms of fiscal, not monetary policy. But sure,
at the end of the day, you could say there's something more fundamental
going on--i.e. that this is the malign invisible hand, wrecking an economy
with enormous overcapacity and insufficient exit from unprofitable lines.
But Japan's overcapacity was an effect of the asset bubble at the end of the
80's, itself the effect of monetary easing after the 1987 US market crash
(to support the dollar) and the asset management strategies after the Plaza
Accord (to restore Japanese "competitiveness") that induced the bubble. So
there is competition; there are winners and losers. But there's no getting
around the "externalities" that make up the field. (And I don't think it's
not Marxist to say this.)
All best
Christian
