In this episode we turn to one of the most extraordinary and longest-lasting asset bubbles in modern history: the Japanese Asset Price Bubble of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This is the story of how Japan—once the miracle economy of the postwar world, the nation that seemed poised to overtake the United States as the global economic superpower—became trapped in a deflationary spiral that has lasted more than three decades. In the second half of the 1980s, Japanese stock and real-estate prices soared to levels that defied any reasonable measure of value.
