No Time For Nationalism

摘要

During the 1980s, Japan rose as a technology superpower. In the United States and Europe, policy-makers, journalists and academics talked about how to compete with Japan or even be like Japan. By the end of that decade, a bubble economy created by incredibly high land values and incredibly low interest rates was at its height in Japan, leading to massive borrowing and investment in stocks and securities - much the same as in the United States and Europe until recently.rnThen the bubble burst. In 1990, the government imposed a restriction on loans for land purchase, hoping to control the rising real-estate prices. Instead, this led to a crash in the stock market and a crisis in the banking sector. This brought the Japanese economy to a com-rnplete halt, which lasted throughout the 1990s: a period often called the 'lost decade'.