Is Japan a Warning for the U.S. Economy?

For most of the last thirty years, money in Japan was essentially free. Now the Bank of Japan has raised its key rate to 1% — and a lot of people are asking what it really means.

In this week’s Weekly Comment, Richard Vague breaks down why Japan’s rates sat near zero for a generation, what its scary debt headline looks like once you net out the assets the government holds against it (235% of GDP becomes 134%), and why Japan — the world’s number two economy in the 1990s, now around 4% — may be twenty years ahead of the U.S. and China.

Watch the full breakdown to see what Japan’s path tells us about our own.

2 Comments

@Ashkan8244 on 2026-06-26 16:11

Thanks for having geniuses like Richard in this world, so we can view the future prospects clearly.
@thomasjgallagher924 on 2026-06-26 16:21

Excellent stuff, Folks. I'm thinking Japan is more likely to stay "Japan" than the US is to become it. The main reason I say that is the US is still an immigration-friendly society whereas Japan has never been. Yeah we have a current administration presenting a different face to the world, but still, whether they really understand it, most Americans claim to be pro legal immigration. Not only is that not the case in Japan, it wouldn't ne easy for people to emigrate to Japan. It has a (difficult) language basically only the Japanese speak and a bery rigid society.

Japan may get its debt in order (and I do hope and think so) but it's going to continue to decline in relative importance.