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Strategies & Market Trends : Dividend investing for retirement -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mopgcw who wrote (20179)	6/30/2014 6:19:57 PM
From: JimisJim	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34328

Yes, Japan still maintained (until very recently) an export economy. Plus, they never made the banks square their books wrt bad loans and thus never directly bailed them out -- though one could argue that by allowing them to carry bad debt on the books for so long, they got backdoor bailouts. There are other differences between Japan and the US economies, but those are the main ones. However, that's not to say that we are different from Japan in one important aspect, because we are very like them in terms of facing deflationary forces in the economy overall (even as specific sub sectors are seeing real inflation, e.g., food and energy in the US). And those deflationary forces may prompt the FED to keep interest rates at or near zero for many years longer than many think -- unless the FED just raises rates because they said they would and certain "parties" would benefit from raising them whether we were seeing actual inflation or not. The thing is, deflation scares most central bankers way more than moderate inflation because it is even harder to turn around than moderate/high inflation. You can't reverse deflation with cutting rates below zero, though you can stop high inflation in its tracks the way Volker did in the '80s by sharply increasing FED rates.