Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated on July 8, 2022. He was delivering an endorsement speech for candidates from his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). He was 67 years old.
As a mark of respect for his tenure and past leadership, his party secured a decisive victory in the upper house election on July 10.
Abe was the longest-serving Prime Minister of Japan. He served as Prime Minister and President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 2006 to 2007. He resigned for health reasons. But he resumed his post as Prime Minister again from 2012 to 2020.
I visited Japan while researching my 2018 book, Collusion. There’s a whole chapter in that book on Japan that includes lots of information I gleaned through my boots-on-the-ground research in Tokyo.
I discovered that though Japan and China are officially adversaries in terms of central bank collaboration, they are actually more connected below the surface than they are publicly.
I also discovered that Japan is more in the crosshairs of economics, finance, and diplomacy between the U.S. and China than the mainstream media would have you believe.
After the book was published, I returned to Japan to give several talks at venues including the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club.
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Nomi addressing the Tokyo Stock Exchange
I also held meetings with some of the most influential and politically connected members of Japan’s business community.
Frequent Visitor
My visits to Japan trace back to my time as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers in the early 1990s.
And later, when I ran the international analytics group as a senior managing director at Bear Stearns in London during the rest of the 1990s, I also visited Japan regularly.
I would often travel to Tokyo to work with our Japan team. We tailored structured transactions for customers in Europe that wanted exposure to the Japanese markets, or visa versa.
I have fond memories of all my trips to Tokyo – including when I “won” a local karaoke contest at an underground (literally) bar in Shibuya.
I was there to promote my book, All the Presidents’ Bankers, which was published in Japanese.
I still return to Japan frequently for meetings and private conferences. A few years ago, I addressed many Japanese financial elites at the invitation of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Also, I’m delighted to say that I just signed a deal for my next book, Permanent Distortion, to be translated into Japanese and published in Japan!
The Original Money Conjurer
Today, I’m sharing an excerpt from Collusion. It details the role of the Bank of Japan in global central bank collusion. In fact, the Bank of Japan was the original money conjurer.
In 2001, in response to a severe financial and banking crisis, it formulated an early version of the quantitative easing (QE) adopted widely by the Federal Reserve and other global central banks.
Since Japan is such a large player in the easy money policy arena, I wanted to look back at how that role evolved at the beginning of the Great Distortion.
This was before Abe took office. But when he did, his strategy on the economy – called “Abenomics” – was largely based on an ultra-loose monetary policy.
I’ll be sharing excerpts about that and what it means to today’s monetary environment and global economic relationships going forward.
But for now, I hope you enjoy today’s excerpt on the key role Japan played in what has now become go-to monetary policy for central banks around the world.
To read the excerpt, follow this link.
Until tomorrow,
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Nomi Prins
Editor, Inside Wall Street with Nomi Prins