This rigorous, timely, and engaging study analyzes the main innovations in Japan's financial markets over the last fifteen years. It investigates how Japan's fiscal deficits and current account swings have generated self-perpetuating cycles of innovation and deregulation in financial markets. Using portfolio theory, the book presents much original material on hotly debated issues, including how internationalized Japan's capital market is and how monetary policy is reacting to innovations.
An overview chapter describes macro trends using a tripartite framework of overall asset intensity, distribution of assets among economic sectors, and the portfolio composition of each sector. Feldman notes strengthened feedback among interest rates and bases a unique taxonomy of financial innovation on this concept of feedback. The taxonomy is applied in chapter 3 to a description of micro developments in Japanese financial markets. Chapters 4 and 5 use a formal econometric model to dig deeper into questions about the nature of the loan market and monetary policy tools.Feldman focuses next on approaches to internationalization. Chapter 6 concerns the legal approach, which emphasizes how and why regulations on capital flows changed. Surprising conclusions are reached in chapter 7 using the quantity approach, which relates who transacted how much of which types of assets, and when. The price approach, based on the concept of interest parity, puts an actual date on internationalization. These three approaches are integrated in chapter 9, in a theoretical model that shows how opening financial markets to foreigners affects exchange rates and interest rates. A concluding chapter integrates the recurrent themes of market pressure, feedback, and deregulation in a provocative set of speculations on the future of the Japanese financial system.
