Jon Hilsenrath of WSJ has a superb article on how Bernanke lectured Japan in 1990s and 2000s and faces a similar situation in US. He had several suggestions for Japan and will be interesting to see whether he can apply them on his own country.
As a Princeton professor in the 1990s, Ben Bernanke lectured Japanese officials for mishandling their economy.
Today, Tokyo’s economic problems are more than academic for the Federal Reserve chairman. They are a window into his own situation as he stares at what could be a long period of slow growth, high unemployment and declining inflation in the U.S.
Mr. Bernanke is preparing for a potentially important policy speech Friday, when he could detail his thinking on the Fed’s next steps at a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on monetary policy in a low-inflation environment. The conference is a reprise of a 1999 conference at which Mr. Bernanke and other academics took Japanese officials to task for failing to get their economy moving.
Buried in Mr. Bernanke’s earlier writings on Japan are hints of how he is shaping the Fed’s responses to today’s slow recovery.
Much of it is similar to a post I had written a while back. Though this has more insights.
