The Japanese Postal Savings System is the largest financial institution in the world, private or public. It controls gigantic amounts of financial assets. Whether, how, and when to privatize it is a major issue in Japanese politics which has ramifications for the financial world outside Japan. This is the only book to provide an overall view of the system. It is a rich mixture of policy, institutional, and quantitative analysis.

Traditional money and banking textbooks are long, expensive, and full of so much institutional and technical modeling detail that students cannot understand the big picture. Thomas F. Cargill presents a new alternative: a short, inexpensive book without the 'bells and whistles' that teaches students the fundamentals in a clear, narrative form. In an engaging writing style, Cargill explains the three core components of money and banking, and their interactions: 1) the financial system, 2) government regulation and supervision, and 3) central bank policy. Cargill focuses on the interaction between government financial policy and central bank policy and offers a critique of the central bank's role in the economy, the tools it uses, how these tools affect the economy, and how effective these policies have been, providing a more balanced perspective of government policy failure versus market failure than traditional textbooks.

This book tells the story of the performance of Japan's economic and political institutions starting in the late 1970s through late 2007. The authors explain how Japan's flawed response to new economic, political, and technological forces requiring more open markets and more democratic political institutions ushered in a "lost decade and a half" of economic development from 1990 to 2005. Japan's impressive economic performance in the 1980s in fact masked an "accident waiting to happen," the accident being the burst of the bubble in equity and real estate prices in 1990 and 1991. Japan's iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats, and client industries, combined with a flawed financial liberalization process and policy errors by the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, brought Japan to an abyss of deflation, recession, and insolvency by the late 1990s. The turning point was the election of Koizumi as prime minister in 2001. Koizumi took advantage of important institutional changes in Japan's electoral system and policy making and implemented many changes in economic policy. The book explores Koizumi's economic reform, new developments in Japanese people's socioeconomic conditions, the politics and economy after Koizumi, and the economic and political challenges facing Japan in the new century.

This book analyzes how the bank-dominated financial system-a key element of the oft-heralded "Japanese economic model"-broke down in the 1990s and spawned sweeping reforms. Japan's financial institutions and policy underwent remarkable change in the past decade. The country began the 1990s with a heavily regulated financial system managed by an unchallenged Ministry of Finance and ended the decade with a Big Bang financial market reform, a complete restructuring of its regulatory financial institutions, and an independent central bank. These reforms have taken place amid recession and rising unemployment, collapsing asset prices, a looming banking crisis, and the lowest interest rates in the industrial world. This book analyzes how the bank-dominated financial system-a key element of the oft-heralded "Japanese economic model"-broke down in the 1990s and spawned sweeping reforms. It documents the sources of the Japanese economic stagnation of the 1990s, the causes of the financial crisis, the slow and initially limited policy response to banking problems, and the reform program that followed. It also evaluates the new financial structure and reforms at the Bank of Japan in light of the challenges facing the Japanese economy. These challenges range from conducting monetary policy in a zero-interest rate environment characterized by a "liquidity trap" to managing consolidation in the Japanese banking sector against the backdrop of increasing international competition.

Traditional money and banking textbooks are long, expensive, and full of so much institutional and technical modeling detail that students cannot understand the big picture. Thomas F. Cargill presents a new alternative: a short, inexpensive book without the 'bells and whistles' that teaches students the fundamentals in a clear, narrative form. In an engaging writing style, Cargill explains the three core components of money and banking, and their interactions: 1) the financial system, 2) government regulation and supervision, and 3) central bank policy. Cargill focuses on the interaction between government financial policy and central bank policy and offers a critique of the central bank's role in the economy, the tools it uses, how these tools affect the economy, and how effective these policies have been, providing a more balanced perspective of government policy failure versus market failure than traditional textbooks.

This book tells the story of the performance of Japan s economic and political institutions starting in the late 1970s through late 2007. The authors explain how Japan s flawed response to new economic, political, and technological forces requiring more open markets and more democratic political institutions ushered in a lost decade and a half of economic development from 1990 to 2005. Japan s impressive economic performance in the 1980s in fact masked an accident waiting to happen, the accident being the burst of the bubble in equity and real estate prices in 1990 and 1991. Japan s iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats, and client industries, combined with a flawed financial liberalization process and policy errors by the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, brought Japan to an abyss of deflation, recession, and insolvency by the late 1990s. The turning point was the election of Koizumi as prime minister in 2001. Koizumi took advantage of important institutional changes in Japan s electoral system and policy making and implemented many changes in economic policy. The book explores Koizumi s economic reform, new developments in Japanese people s socioeconomic conditions, the politics and economy after Koizumi, and the economic and political challenges facing Japan in the new century.