Masaaki Shirakawa is entitled to some serious schadenfreude.
In March 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe effectively fired the Bank of Japan governor for insubordination. Shirakawa, a University of Chicago-trained economist, believed the BOJ alone couldn't restore vibrant growth. Doing so, he argued, required bold structural changes to open an atrophied economy to greater competition. Abe wasn't having it; he replaced the offending BOJ chief with Haruhiko Kuroda, a man ready to fire the monetary bazooka.
Three years on, things turned out just as Shirakawa foretold. The BOJ unleashed unprecedented stimulus, cornered the debt market and aggressively devalued the yen. And yet, deflation is deepening, wages are stagnant and the last Abenomics bulls are scrambling for cover. All you need to know about Abe's "reforms" is that Japan just contracted for a fifth quarter out of the last 12.
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