Almost exactly 20 years ago I packed my stuff in London and moved to Japan. The Tokyo stock market had crashed some two years previously; the property market was in free fall; lenders that had relied on buildings as collateral were gasping for air. Yet the country was in denial about its problems. Nobody imagined that Japan would today be suffering its fifth recession in two decades.
The question is whether Europe is walking the same path. As in Tokyo in the early 1990s, eurozone policy makers believe they are doing as much as politics allows. As in Tokyo, financial markets lull them with periods of calm. And yet, also as in Tokyo, fiscal and monetary policy preclude escape-velocity growth in the short term; structural reform is insufficient to deliver reasonable growth in the medium term; and the authorities underestimate the twin challenges of debt and demography in the long run.
The initial shock that Europeans have experienced is more severe than Japan’s. In the four years after the crash in early 1990 Japan’s economy actually grew by a total of 5 per cent. In the four years since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy the eurozone has shrunk 1.5 per cent. Four years into the crisis, Japan’s equity implosion looked similar to what has befallen peripheral Europe, but its house prices had fallen less than Spain’s or Ireland’s.