After reading “The Crimes and Punishments of Unprecedented Monetary Easing” (Yamamoto Kenzo, Kodansha Gendai Shinsho), I have become worried that the Japanese economy is currently caught in a vicious cycle of prices and wages. This is what is known as hypersensitive inflation. According to the book, this refers to a situation in which, “without any improvement in productivity, wage costs are increasingly passed on to product prices, and the increase in wage costs continues to be passed on to prices at a rate that exceeds the increase in wage costs.” Hypersensitive inflation generally causes suffering to the people for a long period of time. It is more difficult than imagined to get an economy back on track after it has been thrown out of control by extraordinary monetary easing. The Japanese economy is at a critical juncture. (Kei)

※Translating Japanese articles into English with AI