Print money and be damned!

The article below is a guest contribution by Bill Bonner of The Daily Reckoning.

Japan was the world’s most admired economy in the ’80s. Then it was the world’s most despised economy in the ’90s. By 1995, economists pointed their fingers and laughed – the world’s most admired businessman had lost his left shoe.

But now, much of the world is barefoot. The US inflation rate has been going down since the early ’80s and was cut in half since last year. It now hovers barely above zero. Surely Japan – where prices have been falling for two decades – has something to tell us. As we pointed out last week, the Nipponese have been in decline for the last 20 years – with lower stock prices, falling real estate prices, and a falling GDP. Even the population has been sliding for the last five years

This week the Japanese decided to throw some more grit on the slope. Japan’s central bank governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, said he was boosting his “special loan facility” by 10 trillion yen, about $120 billion. And Mr. Naoto Kan, Japan’s Premier, said he would support the central bank, adding a “second pillar of stimulus’ of some 920 billion yen. The numbers always sound impressive in yen. But they are unlikely to give the economy much traction.

Professors Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart studied 15 economic crises over the last 75 years. What they found was what you’d expect: real recoveries in the post-Keynes era are rare. Instead, in the 10 years following a crisis, economic growth rates are lower and unemployment is higher than in the years preceding the crisis. In two thirds of the episodes, jobless rates never recovered to pre-crisis levels, ever. And in 9 out of 10 of them, housing prices were still lower 10 years after the crisis ended.

“Our review of the historical record, therefore, strongly supports the view that large, destabilizing economic events produce big changes in the long-term indicators, well after the upheaval of the crisis