O Keynes japones e o militarismo do pré-guerra
Nesses tempos de análise comparativa com a crise de 1929 – e com o período que a precedeu – não me lembro de ter lido nos jornais sobre o Ministro da Fazenda japonês Korekyo Takahashi.
Enquanto Estados Unidos e Inglaterra quedavam, presos à ortodoxia suicida que aprofundou a crise, em 1931 Takashi foi indicado pelo Imperador para formar o novo gabinete. Imediatamente saiu a campo, convocou as empresas japonesas e saiu mundo afora abrindo mercado para os produtos japoneses. Em dois anos, 25% da produção industrial japonesa estava sendo vendida para os novos mercados.
Vendo a economia desabar, Takashi também esqueceu equilíbrio orçamentário, conseguiu empréstimos com banqueiros conhecidos e financiou um vasto programa de obras públicas, gastos militares e transporte marítimo.
Antes disso, Takashi foi Ministro da Agricultura, com rara preocupação social para aqueles tempos e ponto de contato do Japão com o sistema financeiro ocidental.
Segundo alguns biógrafos, em 1929 antecipou alguns dos princípios que Lord Keynes desenvolveria em seguida.
Autodidata, traduziu o livro “The Pure Theory of Modern Trade”, de Alfred Marshall. E – importante – descobriu que o Japão só se tornaria uma economia relevante se tivesse um povo rico e um exército forte, mas que não escapasse do controle. A política econômica, segundo Takashi, deveria ser para a população em geral.
Em um ano o Japão saiu da crise. Mas o Exército saiu do controle. Pouco tempo depois, Takashi foi assassinado, depois que tentou conter os gastos militares.
Que tal nossos especialistas desenvolverem um pouco mais sobre o Keynes japonês.
Aqui, nota do jornal ABC, da Espanha, de 12 de dezembro de 1931:
“Antes disso, Takashi foi Ministro da Agricultura, com rara preocupação social para aqueles tempos e ponto de contato do Japão com o sistema financeiro ocidental.”
A REFORMA AGRARIA FOI FEITA APÓS A 2ª GURRA PELA FORÇA DE OCUPAÇÃO AMERICANA.
Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv + 377 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-02601-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Michael Schiltz, Department of Oriental and Slavonic Studies, University of Leuven.
…………….. And who could be more qualified to write this biography than Richard Smethurst? As longstanding scholar of Japan’s prewar economic history, he is the author of multiple articles about both Takahashi’s educational formation and his policies — and people in the Bank of Japan close to him (such as Fukai Eigo). It is also fully to Smethurst’s credit that this book is an enticing read: in a lucid and fluent style, he sheds light on many of the lesser known aspects of Takahashi’s education, always with attention to the latter’s interest in self-documentation and irony — think for instance of Takahashi’s relating of his indulgence in drinking alcohol as a youngster (p. 22) or his naive signing into indentured servitude while being in America (p. 26-29)……………
……… Still, it will be the later chapters about the Great Depression (chapters 12 and 13) that will invite the most scrutiny from economic and financial historians. These chapters are very well structured, and Smethurst is aware of the problems he has to tackle. This is the “Holy Grail” of the financial history, as Ben Bernanke once argued, and people like Bernanke, Charles Kindleberger and Robert Skidelsky (the biographer of John Maynard Keynes) have stressed Takahashi’s uniqueness. What needs explanation is the fact that the Great Depression hardly seems to have affected Japan, whereas in other countries, most notably the United States, its effects were so protracted. “In real terms, the Great Depression scarcely occurred in Japan. From 1926 through the 1930’s, real gross national product (GNP) in each succeeding year never declined from its previous level. The economy did experience some stagnation in the 1929-31 period; real GNP rose by only 0.5 percent in 1929, 1.1 percent in 1930, and 0.4 percent in 1931. For the remainder of the 1930’s, however, real GNP grew at an average annual rate of 5.8 percent” (Nanto and Takagi 1985, pp. 369-74).
So, who and what kept the Japanese economy on course? Both Japanese and Western observers have pointed to Takahashi’s surprisingly Keynesian policies:
1) removing Japan from the gold standard,
2) devaluing the yen vis-a-vis the dollar and pound,
3) reducing the Bank of Japan’s prime rate,
4) introducing legislation to raise the limit of the Bank of Japan’s issuance of bank notes,
5) increasing government spending, and 6) making up for the difference between government expenditures and income not by raising taxes but by pioneering a very specific agreement with the Bank of Japan…………….
………….was this not a case of social dumping or “beggaring thy neighbor,” that is, saving your own trade ship at the expense of others? Was Takahashi guilty of a “reckless fiscal policy” because his introduction of the sale of treasury bonds to the central bank rather than directly on the open market would lead to dangerous inflation after his assassination in 1936?
Was not the policy of selling treasury bonds to the Bank of Japan rather than to the public dangerous because it gave finance ministry bureaucrats and central bankers the power to expand the money supply free from market constraints?
Did not Takahashi’s spending, which went primarily to rural relief and the military, play a vital rule in the rise of militarism and the road to Japan’s aggressive war against China, the United States and their allies? …………..
http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1296
Discussion Paper Series A No.395, Did Korekiyo Takahashi Rescue Japan from the Great Depression?
Myung Soo Cha (The Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University and Department of Economics, Yeungnam University) September 30, 2000
…………..Even if the crucial role of Takahashi’s policies in reversing the downt urn is admitted, it seems unlikely that his expansionary measures alone drove the rapid output growth up to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in July 1937. For one thing, most of the devaluation occurred in 1932 and 1933, and then the value of yen began to stabilize. Also the conventional story has it that when the worst seemed over,
Takahashi began to be concerned about inflation and tried to revert to stabilization Reducing expenditure, he attempted to put an end to debt financing, at the same time urging the Bank of Japan to absorb money supplied in the course of debt monetization.
In the standard historical account, the policy reversal eventually prompted the military to decide to kill him in February 1936. 8 While these strongly suggest that the economic growth after the early 1930s was likely to have been propelled largely by causes other than the Keynesian policy measures, the non-Takahashi factors could have been important in reversing the downswing in the early 1930s as well.
There were at least three important non-Takahashi shocks, which are mentioned but not adequately taken into account and controlled for in the previous studies.
One was the recovery in the rest of the world, providing Japan export demand stimuli on the top of the effect of the yen depreciation.
Second, as in many other countries, a consequence of the Great Depression was that the liberal policy regime of the 1920s became discredited and state interventionism gained force in Japan.
The shift in policy regime was pioneered by “new bureaucrats (shinkanryo).” Disillusioned with corrupt party politics and the instability of market economy as witnessed during the 1920s, these reform-minded technocrats wanted to establish a system of control to replace market system.9
The transition found one expression in the legislation of the Major Industries Control Law (Juyo Sangyo Toseiho) in 1931. While the law was not intended to impose direct state control over, but to encourage “cooperation” among, firms in designated “important ind ustries” by forming depression cartels, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry remained in a position to influence investment decisions and output- and price-fixing agreements………..
…………The “heavy and chemical industrialization” drive not only stimulated investment activity and thus contributed to the recovery, but also was welcomed by the military, which has been demanding persistently to get prepared for a war to consolidate control over China since the Manchurian invasion.10………….
………..The third and final factor concerns the labor market. Peter Temin explained the difference in the speed of recovery between the U.S. and Germany in the 1930s in terms of contrasting policies towards the labor market………..
………….Japan in the 1930s resembled Germany more than the U.S. The Great Depression killed not only the classical liberalism in the sphere of economic policy, but also Japan’s nascent democracy (known as the “Taisho democracy”).
As the unemployment rate rose, the demand to put an end to Prime Minister Hamaguchi’s deflation to keep Japan on gold at the expense of internal equilibrium turned into therejection of bipartisan politics………..
……….Two fatal attacks were carried out in 1932, killing Junnosuke Inoue (the Finance Minister in Hamaguchi’s cabinet) in February and Tsuyoshi Inukai (the Prime Minister of Seiyukai cabinet) in May. Thus ended Japan’s brief experiment with parliamentary politics, and the military began to take over the cabinet.12
In the new political environment created by the Manchurian invasion and the rightwing terrorist attacks, both independent unions and proletarian parties suffered a serious setback.
Unionization rate declined from a peak in 1931, and the number of workers in labor disputes as a proportion of total also fell.13…………..
…“At factories throughout the nation in the winter of 1933, an estimated 80,000 union workers and 20,000 non-union employees agreed to work on a Sunday or holiday and donate that day’s wages to the army’s National Defense Fund Drive.”14
Under such circumstances, the real wages declined, a phenomenon not observed either in Nazi Germany and or in fascist Italy.15 Those who identified downward wage flexibility may in fact have been observing the operation of the wage shocks…………..
http://www.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/Common/publication/DP/DP395.pdf
Takahashi apareceu em um 50 Yen notas emitidos pelo Banco do Japão em 1951. É a única vez que um ex-presidente do Banco do Japão já apareceu em uma das notas do Japão.
Residência Takahashi Tóquio é agora o “Takahashi Korekiyo Memorial Park” em Tokyo Minato Ward, Akasaka.
Série B 50-nota do banco de ienes do Japão
http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Series_B_50_yen_Banknote.jpg/200px-Series_B_50_yen_Banknote.jpg
Takahashi Korekiyo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_Korekiyo
Prominent People of MINATO CITY
From the National Diet Library’s home page (Permission to reprint must first be obtained from the National Diet Library.)
Biography
1854-1936. Politician…………………..
……….Association with Minato City
The site of his home where he spent his last 30 years is now his memorial park
Korekiyo, who was born in Zojoji Chumon-mae, lived in Sendai Manor in Shiba Atagoshita until he was 11, and in his house in Akasaka until his death in 1936. In his autobiography, he wrote this on New Year’s Day 1902: “Because my new house, which has been under construction in Akasaka Omote-machi, is today nearly completed, except for the entrance and the corridor, I have moved from my old residence in the estate.” The site of his house, which was the setting of the February 26 Incident, has been turned into the Takahashi Korekiyo Memorial Park and is now a place of recreation and relaxation on Aoyama Street, which contains Korekiyo’s bronze statue, a pond, stone lanterns, and trees. ……………..
http://www.lib.city.minato.tokyo.jp/yukari/e/man-detail.cgi?id=57
EM PDF 43 páginas
Professor Richard J Smethurst, University of Pittsburgh
‘Takahashi Korekiyo’s Economic Policies in the Great
Depression and their Meiji Roots’
Professor Masataka Matsuura, Hokkaido University
‘Analysing the Relationship between Business and
Politics in Pre-War Japan: Some Thoughts on the Zaikai
The Suntory Centre
Suntory and Toyota International Centres
for Economics and Related Disciplines
London School of Economics and Political Science
On 18 June 1999 a symposium was held at the Suntory Centre at which there
were two speakers………
……….The paper by Richard J Smethurst discusses the influences that led to the
economic policies pursued in the interwar period by Takahashi Korekiyo, who
engineered Japan’s recovery from the depression in the early 1930s, and is
often thought of as the ‘Keynes’ of Japan. The paper traces the influence on
Takahashi’s thinking of his Western experiences and diverse bureaucratic
career, but focusses in particular on the role of Takahashi’s mentor, Maeda
Masana.
The paper by Masataka Matsuura analyses the term zaikai as used in prewar
Japan and its identity as a small network whose influence was distinct from
that of the zaibatsu. The paper traces the membership and activities of this
small group from the time of Shibusawa Eiichi through to the Second World
War, and argues for the importance of the functions they discharged in the
context of the developing Japanese economy………..
…………..Takahashi Korekiyo was one of Japan’s greatest financial statesmen
because as an economic thinker he was ahead of his times – in Japan,
and worldwide as well. Takahashi, alone among Japanese financial
leaders, understood well before he became finance minister in
December 1931 during the depression, five important economic
principles, which in combination were not held, as far as I know, by any
other Japanese governmental financial leader before the post-World
War II Keynesian revolution. These principles were: governments, by
devaluing their currencies and deficit financing, can use monetary and
fiscal policy to stimulate economic growth in times of recession;
governments, by upwardly valuing their currencies and balancing or
running a surplus in their current account budgets, can use monetary
and fiscal policy to contract demand and fight inflation when economies
overheat; market information is the key to economic growth; economic
development should raise the standards of living of a nation’s populace
and not just make the state wealthy and powerful; and excessive military
spending endangers the nation’s economic health.
The primary purpose of this essay is to investigate how Takahashi
learned this set of ideas long before they became commonplace. To be
sure Takahashi spoke, read, and wrote English fluently and had a wide
range of foreign acquaintances. But I shall argue that the primary influences on his thinking were his own experiences in his fifty year
bureaucratic career before the end of World War I, and in particular his
associations with another official, Maeda Masana, who also figures
prominently in this essay. Maeda understood intuitively in the 1880s not
only the crucial importance of markets in disseminating information, but
also the importance of insuring that ‘rich country’ (fukoku) meant rich
people and that ‘strong army’ (ky hei) did not get out of hand……………
……………And Takahashi clearly understood the theory behind a spending policy
during a severe recession, as the following quote from an article he
wrote in November 1929 while his deflationist predecessor as finance
minister, Inoue Junnosuke, was still in office, shows:
‘If someone goes to a geisha house and calls a geisha, eats
luxurious food, and spends 2,000 yen, we disapprove morally. But
if we analyze how that money is used, we find that the part that
paid for food helps support the chef’s salary, and is used to pay for
fish, meat, vegetables, and seasoning, or the costs of transporting
it. The farmers, fishermen, and merchants who receive the money
then buy clothes, food, and shelter. And the geisha uses the
money she receives to buy food, clothes, cosmetics, and to pay
taxes. If this hypothetical man does not go to a geisha house and
saves his 2,000 yen, bank deposits will grow, but the efficacy of
his money will be lessened.
But he goes to a geisha house and his money is transferred to the
hands of farmers, artisans, and fishermen. It goes in turn to
various other producers and works twenty or thirty times over.
From the individual’s point of view, it would be good to save his
2,000 yen, but when seen from the vantage point of the national
economy, because the money works twenty or thirty times over,
spending is better.’2.
In the final chapter of his life, in 1934-35, when Japan’s economy
expanded and neared full employment because of his stimulative efforts,
inflation threatened; thus, Takahashi followed another of the five principles: he attempted to introduce tight-money, balanced-budget
policies. Takahashi, ever the flexible pragmatist, decided to reduce
spending by making cuts in allocations to those areas which had
expanded most rapidly in 1932-34, rural relief and the military……………….
http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/js/JS381.pdf
Pode se suceder algo parecido no Brasil, caso os militares sejam beneficiados com gordo orçamento?
Analisem o comportamento dos integrantes da Força Publica de São Paulo, mandam em todos os setores de nossa vida, quer explicita ou implicitamente, falo dos estrelinhas, vez q. aos subordinados cabe receber ordens.
A Força Publica de São Paulo tem efetivo de 100mil homens e armamentos fortes, seus estrelinhas comandam a maioria das empresas de segurança, estão fortemente postados nos setores de nossa justilça através a segurança prestada e por ai vai, entendo q. a Força Publica de São paulo e de outros estados devam merecer estudos fortes e serem barradas nas suas pretenções.
Como miltarismo entendo somente Exercito, Marinha e Aereonautica
Acorda Brasil
zamperetti fiori
cidadão e,
ex-árbitro de futebol
Como desde o fim da ditadura, eles nunca ficaram sob controle, receio que com essa nova injeção de recursos, eles venham a sair do controle.
O único “japonês” assassinável que tivemos ,foi Shigeaki Ueki . Agora, é tarde…
O PAPEL DO GOVERNO NA RETOMADA ECONÔMICA JAPONESA(PDF) 16 páginas
Hélcio Takeda/Profª. Orientadora Mônica Yukie Kuwahara
…………..2 A Política Econômica Japonesa
Antes mesmo da publicação da Teoria Geral de Keynes, o ministro das finanças do
Japão Korekiyo Takahashi, apelidado de Keynes japonês, já colocava em prática uma política
de aumentos nos gastos do governo durante o final dos anos 20, o que contribuiu para que a
economia japonesa não sofresse as conseqüências da Grande Depressão e pudesse reagir à
desaceleração mundial ocupando a capacidade ociosa existente (SMETHURST, 2000). Houve
expansão nos gastos governamentais, que eram financiados com a emissão de títulos do
governo, com baixas taxas de juros, ofertados diretamente ao Banco do Japão, ao invés de
serem oferecidos em operações de open market. Esta expansão monetária e fiscal provocou
um aumento na demanda por meio circulante, que por sua vez refletiu no aumento da
demanda agregada. Entre os anos 1930 a 1938, o PIB japonês cresceu a uma taxa média anual
de 5,8% (SMETHURST, 2000)…………
http://www.mackenzie.br/fileadmin/Graduacao/CCSA/Publicacoes/Jovens_Pesquisadores/02/2_2_10.pdf