as the FT notes this morning<\/a>:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-16-at-07.30.01-550x141.png\")
<\/p>\n
As that article makes clear, not only is the rate rising, but the Japanese central bank is planning to end its quantitative easing programme, which has delivered government debt-to-GDP ratios well over 200% in that country, without any apparent harm to the economy arising.<\/p>\n
Why would it want to do that? There are three reasons..<\/p>\n
First, it wants to support rising interest rates at cost to the people of Japan.<\/p>\n
Second, it wishes to withdraw liquidity from the Japanese economy, at cost to the people of Japan.<\/p>\n
Third, it must want to shrink the Japanese economy.<\/p>\n
Those will be the consequences of the Japanese government's actions, and I am going to presume that it is rational, and knows what it is doing, and therefore desires these outcomes.<\/p>\n
Why, in a world of massive uncertainty, it would wish to do this is hard to work out, but what we do know is that Japan now has a government that models itself on Margaret Thatcher, whose primary goal during her period in government was to increase inequality in the UK. I think we can safely assume that is the object of the Japanese government, and if it is, that they are going the right way about it.<\/p>\n
In other words, this is a government that has set out to be at war with its own people.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I am expecting others to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We are told that the war in the Gulf is over. I don’t believe that. Yesterday’s poll on this issue here suggested that you don’t
Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,35,16,147,224,106,235,223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-justice","category-economics","category-ethics","category-inequality","category-neoliberalism","category-politics","category-politics-for-people","category-politics-of-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93226,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93224\/revisions\/93226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}