Why Shinzo Abe is Not a Market Monetarist

     He is many things. However, he's no MMer. After all, he believes in public investment as well as monetary stimulus.

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/05/does-abenomics-disprove-keynesian.html

     After all, would a Market Monetarist say this?

     "Abe calls his approach the "three arrows" -- monetary easing, public investment and structural reforms -- which, he believes, taken alone can be bent but together will be invincible. From the moment he came to power, he has taken a different approach than leaders in the West, including his decision to replace Masaaki Shirakawa, the cautious head of the Bank of Japan, with an Oxford-trained former Finance Ministry official, Haruhiko Kuroda, who has committed to do "whatever it takes" to make economic growth a priority."

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/shinzo-abe-arianna-huffington_b_3245338.html

   No. A MMer only has two arrows. The crux of MM is that it believes in two things:

   1. Monetary easing

   2. Fiscal austerity

    Marcus Nunes claimed I was lying in saying this but the record is clear: I didn't make this up, they're Sumner's own words.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/05/scott-sumner-has-now-written-2001-posts.html

    It will certainly always take "structural reforms" as well. Sumner and company see fiscal stimulus and monetary easing as essentially mutually exclusive. The more you have of one, the less you get of the other. Sumner actually has claimed that we'd have lower unemployment today if we didn't have the ARRA stimulus in 2009. Why? Because then the Fed would have had the pressure of it being all on them.

    Talk about perverse incetivization.

    Overall, you got to love Abe. Noahpinion has admitted to being wrong about him.

    http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/abe-surprised-me.html

    Indeed, as he admits, he was totally wrong about Abe. Even the part of his skepticism that seemed most likely-that Abe would not be good for women's rights-due to the historical sexism of his party-at this point looks like it may be wrong.

    http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/trust-not-in-shinzo-abe-ye-monetarists.html

    His anti-sexist agenda is very surprising if you looked at things as Smith did-which was quite reasonable:

    "Among his staunchest supporters are women, whose cause he has championed. I asked him about his statement that women are Japan's "most underused resource," and his plans to address this. "Let me start with my own Liberal Democratic Party," he said. "For the first time in the party's history, of the three members on the executive board, two are women." (One of them, Seiko Noda, is actually the chair of the party, and here's what she wrote in her blog post on Huffington Post Japan on the day of our launch.)

"I urged Japanese corporations to include at least one female executive member on their board," said Abe, "and I told them that the female members could be Japanese or foreign." ("So, there might be some job offers for you," he joked.)"

     "I asked if he planned to just use the bully pulpit or if he also intends to propose legislation. "When companies make an effort to make it easier for women to return to work after maternity leave, I'm considering various measures ranging from publicly praising their efforts to tax relief," he said.

   At this point Abe is doing more than any policymaker in the world to turn the economy around. I think if anything, he underscores something else: Fed independence may not be such a hot idea.

    In this as in so many other things, are country's governmental structure is set up to achieve little but gridlock. Abe can do so much because of his power.

    It deserves to be looked into more. Two things really bad about are nation's government:

    1. Fed independence

    2. The U.S. Senate-starting with the filibuster

    On the other hand, Bernanke is certainly doing a much better job than the EU.