标题: Japan's Recovery Is Complicated by a Decline in Household Savings [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 3-19-2015 11:51 标题: Japan's Recovery Is Complicated by a Decline in Household Savings Jonathan Soble, Japan's Recovery Is Complicated by a Decline in Household Savings. Business Standard, May 19, 2015. www.business-standard.com/articl ... 115032000012_1.html
Quote: "Japan isn't about to run out of spare cash soon. Thanks to the high savings rates of the past, about 1,400 trillion yen of household financial assets remain tucked away, or more than $11.5 trillion. And Japanese businesses have replaced households as avid hoarders of cash. * * * Most experts say it would be a good thing if businesses hoarded less and spent more. But Mr. Abe's aim is a delicate one, because the same pile of savings is supporting Japan's huge government debt. Naohiko BABA 馬場 直彦, the chief Japan economist at Goldman Sachs, worries what will happen if both households and companies turn their backs on saving. At the equivalent of two and a half years of economic output, Japan's debt load is the heaviest in the world. Yet about 90 percent of the debt is held locally, meaning that Japan is, in effect, lending to itself. That is one reason, economists say, that Japan has avoided the kind of bond market pressure that has sent less indebted countries like Greece into crisis. Mr Baba calculates that Japan could run short of the savings it needs to fund the debt locally by about 2020. After that, it would need to turn to foreign investors - a potentially destabilizing shift."
Note:
(a) "Last Updated at 00:08 IST"
IST = India Standard Time
(b) The German and Jewish surname Soble is Americanized from Sobel. The latter is from Slavic sobol ‘sable’ (the animal).
(c) Japanese surnames
* Fukuoka 福岡
* Inadome 稲留
* Shimoda 下田
(d) "The country's savings rate, long one of the highest in the world, is now below zero."
By itself, it only means a snap shot of the present. The saving rate today is zero--that is, not saving for now--does not mean Japanese do not have saving (from the past). But, see next.
(e) "About 40 per cent of unmarried adults are zero savers ['those with little or no financial assets'], and 30 per cent of families are, according to the Central Council for Financial Services Information 金融広報中央委員会, a research group affiliated with Japan's central bank. A decade ago, the ratio for both groups was about 10 percentage points lower."
(f) "Mitsuaki YOKOYAMA 横山 光昭, a financial planner and author of a series of best-selling books on how to save money"