How Japan went from MIRACLE to DISASTER? | Economic Case study
Think School's case study of Japan's rise and stall. After World War II, America rebuilt Japan as a capitalist showcase against communism - billions into factories, steel and electronics blueprints, and open access to US consumers - taking Japanese incomes from $500 in the 1960s to $25,000 by the 1980s, with Japanese cars at 23% of the US market and six of the world's ten largest companies Japanese. The 1985 Plaza Accord halved the dollar's value against the yen (260 to 130), wiping out Japan's cost advantage; the response - factories moved abroad and interest rates cut from 5% to 2.5% - inflated twin stock and land bubbles (the Nikkei went from 6,000 to 38,915; Japanese land was priced at four times all US land; nearly 30% of Toyota's pre-tax profit came from trading). When rates snapped back to 6%, the crash left Nissan with $20 billion in debt, Sony writing off $2.7 billion on Columbia Pictures, and Samsung dethroning Toshiba in memory chips. The episode blames the lost decades on zombie companies - by the early 2000s an estimated 30% of Japanese firms - kept alive on interest-only loans, plus a hiring freeze that wasted a generation (in 2015, one in four Japanese men was unmarried at 50) and a birth rate that fell below 680,000. It closes with lessons for India: let bad companies fail (the 2016 Bankruptcy Code), never depend on one trading partner, and fix graduate unemployability before India's demographic blessing becomes Japan's curse. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. Figures are as narrated in the episode. Sponsor: Odoo. Nothing here is investment advice.
