Americans Enjoying Final Days of Artificial Economy

From the NIA:

In recent days, Japan has intervened in the foreign currency market to artificially drive down the value of the yen. Japan's actions to weaken the yen have driven it from 83 to 85.73 against the U.S. dollar. Most analysts in the mainstream media are portraying this as Japan's attempt to "head off a deflation spiral". Almost everybody is applauding Japan's move, saying it was needed in order to "shore up its export-driven economy".

The truth is, although Japan claims to be helping Japanese citizens with this move, Japanese citizens are the ones who will actually suffer. Despite Japan's economy entering into recession last year, the Japanese were able to maintain their same standard of living because prices were falling due to their strong currency. Some of the largest Japanese exporters like Toyota and Sony saw their revenues decline last year by 20.8% and 12.9% respectively, but this was only bad for shareholders of these companies. Despite rapidly declining revenues for Japanese exporters, Japan's unemployment rate only reached a peak of 5.6% last year and is now down to 5.2%.

The Japanese should be happy and grateful for how strong their economy is compared to the U.S. economy. When it comes to exporters in Japan, their problem is not the strong yen, but the weak U.S. dollar. If Japanese exporters allow the U.S. dollar to collapse, their revenues will continue to decline substantially, but that is a healthy part of a free market economy. Within a year or two, a strengthening yen would allow the Japanese to spend more on their own goods, and revenues for Toyota and Sony would come back strong.

Japan's efforts to postpone a few Japanese corporations going through a brief but tough readjustment period are helping to artificially prop up the standard of living for Americans one last time. NIA believes that the Japanese better be careful what they wish for. Never before in world history has nearly every developed country been in battle with each other to have the weakest currency. Asian producing countries want their currencies to be the weakest so that they can have the honor of shipping their products to Americans who can't afford them......read on