I was assuming that the lack of inflation meant that they didn’t fully carry out what he had in mind. Maybe something that Eliezer, or Scott Sumner, has written would help clarify things.
It looks like Japan did loosen their monetary policy some, which could give evidence on whether or not the theory was right. But I think that would require a more in-depth analysis than what’s in this post. I don’t read the graphs as showing ‘clearly nothing changed after Abe & Kuroda’, just that there wasn’t the kind of huge improvement that hits you in the face when you look at a graph, which is what I would’ve expected from fixing a trillions-dollar mistake. If we’re looking for smaller effects, I’d want a more careful analysis rather than squinting at graphs. (And when I do squint at these graphs, I see some possible positive signs. 2013-19 real GDP growth seems better than I would’ve predicted if I had only seen the pre-Kuroda graph, and Kuroda’s first ~year is one of the better years.)
I was assuming that the lack of inflation meant that they didn’t fully carry out what he had in mind. Maybe something that Eliezer, or Scott Sumner, has written would help clarify things.
It looks like Japan did loosen their monetary policy some, which could give evidence on whether or not the theory was right. But I think that would require a more in-depth analysis than what’s in this post. I don’t read the graphs as showing ‘clearly nothing changed after Abe & Kuroda’, just that there wasn’t the kind of huge improvement that hits you in the face when you look at a graph, which is what I would’ve expected from fixing a trillions-dollar mistake. If we’re looking for smaller effects, I’d want a more careful analysis rather than squinting at graphs. (And when I do squint at these graphs, I see some possible positive signs. 2013-19 real GDP growth seems better than I would’ve predicted if I had only seen the pre-Kuroda graph, and Kuroda’s first ~year is one of the better years.)