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Originally Posted by $5 submissions
It's too soon to tell. Give it a few more years and a few more stimulus bills/bailouts. If, after stimulus 4, we're still fuxor3d, then yeah, call it a lost decade. Japan had a shitload of stimulus bills and it didn't do shit. Plus they have a higher savings rate than the US.
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Their problem mainly was that they cut spending in other areas in order to fund the stimulus bills, so the net effect on the economy was close to zero.
Japan waited 17 months to cut interest rates, and it wasn't until 5 years in that they got them below 0.5%.
Plus, they didn't have "mark to market" accounting, so the banks never wrote down the massive real estate losses in a timely manner....they kept those loans on the books at full value for way too long and that's one of the reasons their credit market took so long to recover.
