The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics Lessons from Japan's Great Recession

The revised edition of this highly acclaimed work presents crucial lessons from Japan's recession that could aid the US and other economies as they struggle to recover from the current financial crisis.This book is about Japan's 15-year long recession and how it affected current theoretical thinking about its causes and cures. It has a detailed explanation on what happened to Japan, but the discoveries made are so far-reaching that a large portion of economics literature will have to be modified to accommodate another half to the macroeconomic spectrum of possibilities that conventional theorists have overlooked.The author developed the idea of yin and yang business cycles where the conventional world of profit maximization is the yang and the world of balance sheet recession, where companies are minimizing debt, is the yin. Once so divided, many varied theories developed in macro economics since the 1930s can be nicely categorized into a single comprehensive theory- The Holy Grail of Macro Economics

Richard C. Koo is the Chief Economist of Nomura Research Institute, the research arm of Nomura Securities, the leading securities house in Japan. Consistently voted as one of the most reliable economists by Japanese capital and financial market participants for nearly a decade, he has also advised successive prime ministers on how best to deal with Japan's economic and banking problems. He served as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and was a Doctoral Fellow of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Author of many books, including Balance Sheet Recession: Japan's Struggle with Uncharted Economics and its Global Implications, and a visiting professor of Waseda University, he was awarded the Abramson Award by the National Association of Business Economics, Washington, D.C. in 2001.