Guest Post: Japan's Patriotic War Agenda

Authored by Andrew McKillop, The Sickly GiantJapan has the the world's third-biggest economy and was only recently pushed into this third place by China - but it remains world No 1, and by far, as measured by its sovereign debt-to-GNP ratio. Its new Liberal Democratic Party-LDP government, no different from LDP governments which have almost exclusively ruled since 1955, is setting out with a proud (in fact desperate) task: to end deflation by pushing down the world value of the JPY (yen) to a theoretical point where "inflation of 2% or 3% a year" will be possible. The return of inflation, in official Japanese liberal newspeak, will make the economy less sickly even if the strategy "has risks". One of these is war with China, if only as a (Japanese) crowd pleaser, and another is selling off Japan's over-one-trillion dollar holding of US Federal debt at exactly the right psychological mom...