The golf courses of Japan are a useful financial indicator. As members succumb either to straitened circumstances in a struggling economy or to old age, these lush expanses of manicured grass — symbolic of the excesses of the bubble years — are falling out of favour. A foreign-owned property company in Tokyo has begun buying them up and, reflecting the popular anxiety following Fukushima, is converting them into solar farms.
The Bank of Japan’s decision to embrace negative interest rates, the latest attempt to reinvigorate the ossified economy, does not apply to retail deposits . . . at least, not yet. That, however, is small comfort to the salarymen and their retired counterparts who have seen the return on their savings decimated by years of zero interest rates.
Despite Shinzo Abe’s boasts about the “three arrows” of his Abenomics programme, there has been only ever one missile in the prime minister’s quiver: yen depreciation (albeit indirectly), through ever-lower interest rates, to support Japanese exporters as they try to fend off rivals such as China and Vietnam. The other two arrows — fiscal and structural reform — are but pinpricks.