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Abenomics

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Abenomics is the name given to a suite of measures introduced by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe after his December 2012 re-election to the post he last held in 2007. Abe has focused his second term on turning around his country's moribund economy. The economic policies that Abe supports include an aggressive set of monetary, fiscal, and structural reforms geared toward spurring inflation and pulling Japan out of its decades-long deflationary slump. The broad goal is to boost annual GDP growth, which currently stands at 2 percent, and raise inflation to 2 percent via short-term stimulus spending, monetary easing, and reforms that will boost domestic labor markets and increase trade partnerships.
Back in September 2012 before Abenomics took a place, the country was suffering its third recession in four years. The yen was uncomfortably strong (trading at 78 to the dollar), the stock market was unsurprisingly weak (the TOPIX index was about 743), and consumer prices (excluding food and energy) were falling for the 45th month in a row. To help us understand better why some changes were necessary let’s look closer on Japanese economic history.
Japan's chronic deflation has resulted in weak demand, despite interest rates floating at 0 percent for years. Over the past two decades, the Japanese government has spent trillions of dollars in various bids to lift its economy out of a severe downturn catalyzed by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. The bursting of the late 1980s property and stock market bubbles caused a banking and corporate debt crisis. The banking sector was saddled with a large numbers of nonperforming loans (where borrowers had either defaulted or had difficulty making repayments). The extent of the problem was not well understood in the early to mid-1990s and banks initially played for time through a policy of forbearance (giving

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