Mat wrote:
>By the way, I just read a novel that includes an interesting exploration of
>consumer debt and personal bankruptcy in Japan:
>
>Miyuki Miyabe, _All She Was Worth_
>
>A lawyer in the book argues that there is a tendency for society to blame the
>individual who goes into debt, but that the fault really lies in the system.
I haven't read the book by Miyabe, but I'll look it up. Consumer
credit does not seem very well developed in Japan, with the exception
of so-called sarakin, which charges usurious interest rates. In
fact, before I came to the USA, I never had any credit card -- now I
have ten!!! My parents & brother -- who have never travelled outside
Japan -- still have none. Japanese workers do not use checking
accounts either (again, my family in Japan do not have one; nor did I
have one before coming to the States), and the absence of checking
accounts, I believe, tends to encourage saving rather than spending.
It feels different spending cash, instead of writing a check (even
aside from the fact that many checking accounts in the USA have
overdraft protection which blurs the boundary between deposit &
credit).
I heard it somewhere that consumer credit (excluding mortgages) makes
up only 3 percent of bank lending in Japan. Is that right?
Were I a "nationalist" member of the ruling class & concerned with
deflation & the "liquidity trap," I'd probably advocate an
accelerated development of consumer credit, as well as developing a
better "social safety net" like unemployment insurance, old age
pension, etc.
However, the fundamental problem that Japan faces is not likely the
"liquidity trap." I believe it is due to (a) the dead end of
export-led industrialization; (b) over-competition & over-capacity in
the existing markets (recall Robert Brenner here); and (c) political
stalemates (the divided ruling class & the weak working class,
neither of which has a coherent program and the strength to create
"consent" to a new settlement in a Gramscian sense & impose its will
on the rest of society). Some parts of the ruling class do not see
the current situation as "their problem" -- instead, they'd rather
make use of this occasion to restructure labor regulations, social
programs, etc. more in line with strict neoliberalism, while other
parts of the ruling class do not have the guts to do so.
Yoshie
