WHERE IS JAPAN GOING TO GET 200 MILLION NEW JAPANESE?:

A Recession in Dog Years: The United States is experiencing what Japan did in the 1990s, but seven times faster. (Daniel Gross, June 24, 2009, Slate)

[I]n a meeting Monday, Kiyohiko Nishimura, Yale-trained economist, former Tokyo University professor, and deputy governor of the Bank of Japan, gave one of the most lucid and useful explications of the credit crisis and its aftermath that I've heard—and I've heard a lot of them. And even more surprisingly, it was pretty optimistic. [...]

Nishimura dates the onset of the Japan crisis to the fourth quarter of 1990, when commercial land prices began to fall, and tracks the policy responses (rate cuts in 1991, stimulus in August 1992 and following years, expanding bank insurance in 1995, bank failures in 1997, injections of public funds into banks in 1998, zero-interest rate policies in February 1999). The Japanese economy began to grow again in 1999 but slipped back into recession in 2001. The final turning point for Japan came in October 2002, when Japan's authorities urged banks to deal more aggressively with problem loans. "The Japanese economy was, in general, out of the woods around 2005," Nishimura concludes. (Of course, it's deep in recession now, with the rest of the global economy.)

If the first chunk of this story sounds familiar, you're right. On an adjacent chart, he shows how the U.S. crisis, which he dates to the decline in mortgage-backed securities prices in February 2007, has followed a remarkably similar course. But that doesn't mean the United States is in for 15 lean years. The resemblance lies more in the sequence of events than in their duration, the rhyming rather than the repeating. In fact, the United States is acting in what might be considered dog years. In the early stages, he said, "one month in the U.S. looked approximately equal to three months in Japan in the early stage." But since September 2008, he said, it's more like "one month in the U.S. is equal to six or seven months in Japan."