Japan eyes double-barrelled stimulus to ease yen strains

Japan looks increasingly likely to fire both fiscal and monetary barrels

What, the arrow metaphors weren't working, so now they've switched to shotguns?

Kuroda has said he won’t resort to helicopter money

(And helicopters, presumably.)

So long as they float me some of that helicopter and not blast me with a shotgun I'm all for it.

Where do we go to collect?

Hasn't this all been done many times before?

I guess you can't fire the third arrow from a shotgun.

fiscal stimulus plan of up to 10 trillion yen extra spending

And what will this be spent on? Schools? Healthcare? Daycare? Plugging the multi-trillion-yen hole Abe's stock-market incompetence left in the pension pot?

Nah. Throw some concrete about, that'll do it. It hasn't worked the last ten times he tried it, so maybe this time?

And where's the money going to come from? An "unavoidable necessity" to increase consumption tax, and residence tax, and land tax and every other yen he can claw out of my pocket, your pocket and your childrens' and grandchildrens' pockets.

What will it take for the Japanese to turf this bungler out?

What a load of bullshido! They are still sitting in millions of dollars of donated relief funds from the Sendai quake! They just love crying poor so they can print more money and increase the already excessive public debt. I've said it many times before, the Japanese economy is doomed under this narrow-minded right-wing government who lack any imagination or creativity in managing a country's economy. They should learn from what they are forcing 95% of the population to do. Manage the funds you have and stop borrowing money!

In a nutshell, Japan eyes new currency manipulation despite saying they don't play with the currency.

No, no, no and NO!

Hasn't this all been done many times before?

17 times since 1995. And it has failed 17 times. I think we can already expect the 18th attempt to fail as much as the previous 17 times have.

What was Einstein's definition of "insanity"?

Were Abe and his friends working in the private sector, and running companies as badly as they were running the government, their companies would be bankrupt, and they would be in prison for defrauding their stockholders. The wonderful thing about being a politician is that since you make the rules, you can make sure they don't apply to you. You can do almost anything you want, and pay no consequence for it. Rig the voting system, then pay off those voters who get three votes per person. When your policies don't work, hold a snap election to delay a general election for a couple of years, so you have more time to loot and mismanage the national economy.

10 trillion yen will buy around 13 million tetrapods like this ↓ We can destroy the remaining 50% of Japan's natural coastline in time for the Olympics.

http://grl.shizuoka.ac.jp/~dkawai/photo/top/Tetrapods.JPG

It's amazing how people can run countries into the ground, and keep getting reelected to do so, who would never be hired anywhere else.

Instead of throwing good money after bad, Japan had better get used to retraction as its new model and elect people who can balance a budget.

Olympics looks like the last stop

Nah. Throw some concrete about, that'll do it. It hasn't worked the last ten times he tried it, so maybe this time?

It's worked for construction company bosses in Yamaguchi and all those other scabby rural backwaters that keep re-electing LDP politicians. So from Abe's point of view whatever else it has or hasn't achieved is immaterial.

There are even calls for the BOJ to resort to “helicopter money” - printing fresh cash for direct injection into the economy, instead of its current easing measures

It's time for the BOJ to give helicopter money a try. Let the cash rain on down as long as deflation persists.

I've been pushing this idea of helicopter money, and moving away from current trickle-down central bank monetary policy, for at least the last year. Putting helicopter money directly in the hands of poor and middle class people who will actually spend it is a sure-fire way to fuel inflation. As it now stands, the BOJ is putting money in the hands of the 1%, and all they are doing is amassing wealth at the expense of the bottom 90%.

“We’re already essentially doing helicopter money,” said one of the officials with direct knowledge of policy-making.

This official is dead wrong. The BOJ's quantitative easing is not "essentially doing helicopter money," fairly far from it. QE is helicopter money for the 1% only. It is essentially Regan-era trickle down economics.

The BOJ's and the U.S. Fed's QE strategies of buying government bonds, and now equities and other securities puts money in the hands of the 1%, hoping that it will trickle down to the rest of the population. By doing that, those central banks have helped bring about the greatest redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the 1% since the Guilded Age of the Robber Barrons. The money is not trickling down. Reaganomics doesn't work.

I'm not convinced it's sure-fire that the poor and middle class would actually spend it, and even if they did I'm not convinced that would fuel inflation sustainably either.

All these games with money are fine so long as they don't go terribly wrong, but I don't think they have much chance of going terribly right. Crappy economies need to made un-crappy, rather than just have loads of crappy money splashed all over them.

The goal of boosting inflation (rather than real economic growth) is out of whack to begin with, in my opinion.

The government is running 40 trillion yen annual budget deficits, the primary market dealers are buying it to partaking in the BOJ trade where they sell it on to the BOJ. The primary market dealers are making a bit of profit, but the government is then spending all that 40 trillion yen. What is going to be different about "helicopter money"?

There is nothing about helicopter money that is going to boost confidence in the future path of the economy for a lot of people, I suspect.

"....direct injection into the economy, instead of its current easing measures, which direct new money to the banks,"

The writer should explain the "new money" is in exchange for an equal value of assets been taken out of the system, which is why all the QE has not been inflationary.

Shooting blanks. Abe and his goons are fresh out of ideas, so they'll just recycle the same failed policies with slight modifications. Keynesian idiots.

My son is in a public junior high school here and has never had a computer class nor has he seen a video in any of the classes on any subject. There are still 40 students in his class! Declining populations are not evident in big cities here-the opposite is true.

And Japan for all its trillions and trillions of yen of stimulus still has the one of the lowest spends on education of all OECD countries.

In fact, I notice that the wealthy here regularly send their children out of Japan for education.

If Japan were really serious about an economic upturn then education investment is the key but that would not allow for the massive kickbacks that spreading concrete everywhere allows for.....

The bottom line is, none of this will work. More of the same. Wash-rinse-repeat.

Wages have been stagnant for 20+ years, with underperforming & overstaffed corporations hiding under the protective shield of government regulation (read: anti-competitiveness). Abenomics, once a glimmer of hope in shaking up the status quo, has been a massive failure by all accounts.

Japan is one of the most tax-rich nations on the planet, yet the government would rather squeeze the working class rather than cut its spending - not to mention all the cronyism, amakudari & kickbacks that are part & parcel with Japanese politics.

Without a systemic overhaul, essentially a total 'resetting' of government & the way it functions, things in Japan will continue to get much worse.