It looks like one of the world's best central bankers will be reappointed. On Friday the government nominated Haruhiko Kuroda for a second term as governor of the Bank of Japan.
It's hard to overstate what a lousy state Japan's economy was in before Abe and Kuroda arrived on the scene. The bursting of real estate and housing bubbles had led to a lost decade in the 1990s, and the 2000s had seen only an incomplete recovery. Growth in per capita incomes resumed, but wages stubbornly continued to fall, inequality rose and the economy remained mired in deflation.
The Great Recession dealt the economy a further blow, and just as it was recovering, the enormous earthquake and tsunami in 2011 devastated whole cities in northeastern Japan, causing the Fukushima nuclear disaster that temporarily shut down the country's nuclear power plants. Hammered by nature, buffeted by the winds of the global economy and weighed down by an aging and shrinking population, Japan was badly in need of dynamic, purposeful leadership.
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