Japan's Great Stagnation: Financial and Monetary Policy Lessons for Advanced Economies

"For years now, those of us teaching the Depression of the 1930s have answered negatively when asked whether it could happen again. Central bankers understand how to head off a deflation. Regulators know how to prevent the banking system from crashing. Policy makers, we reassure our students, have learned the lessons of history. Now Japan's great stagnation is forcing us to rethink this textbook wisdom. Hutchison and Westermann's book will help us figure out how to answer the question when it is posed to future generations of students." Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley