The only real problem the Japanese economy has is their top-heavy population, which isn't a result of monetary policy.
By your own metric of Japan's failure (stock market value), the US economy has excelled tremendously since 1971 (yes, even adjusting for inflation), so now I'm confused about what argument you're making. I also assume all the other points I made stand.
The point with Japan is that their economy is completely stagnant. It's entirely possible to see a healthy growing economy without having runaway inflation. Again, the US was the obvious example. The Campbell's Soup Index is quite a visible illustration of how radically things changed. But with our current system you get endless inflation that negatively affects vast swaths of the population to the benefit of a relatively small percent. Or you get Japan - which went from competing for the world's largest economy to having a dead economy.
As a side note, population age ratios are directly determined by fertility rates. And we went from a system where people were comfortably raising family on a single income, to one where full time workers living alone are, in many cases, not exactly thriving, let alone trying to raise a whole family on that income. Most developed economies are seeing fertility rates plummet and it's entirely possible that monetary policy is indeed playing some potentially significant role in that!
I like the Japan example because they are a modern economy that is absolutely maniacal about inflation, yet their quality of life is very high and their currency floats. Fiat hawks can't countenance this, and have some Rube Goldberg explanation about how floating currencies cause declining birth rates which lead to the only problem the Japanese economy really has.
Aside from there being so, so many other reasons for declining birth rates (if less money means less likely to have kids, why do people with higher incomes or wealth have lower birth rates than those without?), Japan doesn't print money: its inflation is famously low. How can a country with famously low inflation experience declining birth rates due to high inflation from printing money?
My friend you are again severely lacking knowledge here. Saying Japan doesn't print money is like saying that 2+2=5. They are literally the founding fathers of modern quantitative easing and also one of the clearest examples of why it's not really a productive policy in anything beyond the shortest timeframes.
It seems you are more a fan of writing than reading, but this link would be informative. [1]
Sorry I maybe followed what I thought was your argument too far. I thought you were saying fiat currencies create a moral hazard in monetary policy where regulators will be motivated primarily by short term economic growth at the expense of inflation or ultimate collapse under debt. Japan obviously doesn't do this, their growth is minimal (if you could QE your way to 8% GDP growth I'm sure they'd do it) and they have yet to collapse under their debt (debt to GDP ratio is purely hypothetical).
In other words, that article is junk, mostly telling goldbugs what they want to hear. Let's look at some real metrics. Japan's the 4th largest economy in the world. They have reasonably good income inequality. They do have a child poverty problem but this is almost certainly the result of entrenched gender roles--it's very hard for single mothers to be sole providers there. Their neonatal mortality is extremely low, their HDI is super high, their literacy and education rates are very high, their life expectancy is very high, etc etc etc. Unless you think switching to a gold standard would magically fix deeply rooted sexism, I don't know what you're arguing for here. Mostly, it just seems like you pot-shot various economies, which is way easier than running one (another argument I made you failed to respond to).
They're in fact now the 5th largest economy [1], behind Russia and India. And they'll keep going down.
And this was the point - the reason you are able to use them as an example of a country that endlessly prints money without being ravaged by the countless problems places like the US have suffered since 1971 is because their economy is basically frozen in time. This is undesirable.
The ideal one wants is an economy that can increase at a healthy rate without being ravaged by everything we've seen since 1971. And what's the solution? Practically everything before 1971!
To belabor this petty point, they're 4th in nominal and 5th in PPP. Ugh.
> And they'll keep going down.
Yes, because of population issues. Not because they'll be overtaken by powerful non-fiat economies (both the ruble and rupee float as does every currency AFAIK).
> And this was the point - the reason you are able to use them as an example of a country that endlessly prints money without being ravaged by the countless problems places like the US have suffered since 1971 is because their economy is basically frozen in time. This is undesirable.
Without granting that it's "frozen", what's undesirable about it? It sounds nice TBH.
> The ideal one wants is an economy that can increase at a healthy rate
The growth we've seen since the Industrial Revolution is unsustainable. Growth requires energy, and at some point the energy requirement either can't be met, or the heat exhaust from the conversion boils the oceans. Grim, I know.
> without being ravaged by everything we've seen since 1971
Life is so much better than it was in '71 I don't even know where to start. Are there problems now? Of course. Are literally any of them caused by Bretton Woods? Absolutely not.
> And what's the solution? Practically everything before 1971!
Feel free to go down the list of pre-Bretton Woods economic crises I posted and explain why they happened despite everything being better then.
By your own metric of Japan's failure (stock market value), the US economy has excelled tremendously since 1971 (yes, even adjusting for inflation), so now I'm confused about what argument you're making. I also assume all the other points I made stand.