Japan fears liquidity trap after monetary stimulus

Tokyo

HAVING arranged for trillions of yen of financial liquidity to be pumped into the nation's economy over the past two years, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is now scrambling to find ways of getting the money moving through the system, in order to avert a slide back into stagnation and a possible return to deflation.

Renewed anxiety on the part of the Abe administration to get things moving comes as the set of economic and monetary policies known collectively as "Abenomics" reaches its second anniversary, amid charges that the policies have fallen well short of returning the world's third latest economy to vigorous growth or of creating steady inflation.

Neither personal consumption nor corporate capital investment has risen as expected on the back of a massive (and government-encouraged) increase in the monetary base by the Bank of Japan (BOJ), in the face of stepped-up fiscal stimulus. Japan is stuck in a "liquidity trap", s…