HASother places, other customs. While French refinery operators, whose average salary is well over 3,000 euros, are fighting – with a good chance of winning – for a substantial increase in response to rising prices, on the other side of the world, it it’s out of the question to think about it. In Japan, there is no debate on superprofits and very moderate inflation. It should reach 3% in 2022, a record for forty years, and drop to 2% in 2023, according to estimates by the Bank of Japan. Because, curiously, in this country, even when prices increase, wages do not move.
In an interview at FinancialTimesTuesday, October 11, the Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, is once again begging companies to increase their employees, and he hopes that the situation will help him. “By passing price increases, we hope that companies will have the leeway to raise wages”, he explains. And to add, as a good emulator of Ford or Keynes: “In the past, salaries were seen as a cost factor, but looking further ahead, companies need to invest in their employees, for the growth of the economy and their business. »
For the time being, it is not heard. Large companies have their heads – and especially their business – elsewhere, very far from Japan, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which employ 70% of employees, cannot increase their prices for lack of consumption. They are absorbing the current increases in the cost of energy and raw materials, which reduces their margins and prevents them from making a gesture in favor of their personnel.
That’s the whole Japanese mystery. The infernal mechanics of inflation, which sees prices and wages soar together, do not seem to have any hold there. The central bank itself does not believe in it and maintains, alone in the world, its policy of negative rates, when all its Western counterparts raise them in order to stem the rise in prices. Even better, with each economic cold snap, the country releases a new recovery plan. The “whatever it takes” on an industrial scale.
Closed and mercantilist country
It has been going on for forty years. Result: with a staggering debt, which easily exceeds 7,500 billion dollars (7,720 billion euros), or 250% of its gross domestic product, Japan is the most indebted country in the world after Venezuela.
Any other nation would have gone bankrupt. However, the country’s secret weapon lies in the holding of this debt by Japanese households, at least by the banks to which they have entrusted their savings. More than 85% of this debt is purely Japanese, half of which directly in the accounts of the Bank of Japan.
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