Books about the current global economic crisis are being written and published by the truckload. But few - perhaps none - are worth reading, for the crisis is still very much under way, is evolving all the time and is of unknown duration and magnitude. Readers' time would be better spent dwelling upon the lessons of comparable downturns in the past, of which the most recent, most comparable and most dispiriting is that of Japan in the 1990s.rnRichard Koo, chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, a think tank attached to Japan's biggest investment bank, watched Japan's 'lost decade' from an excellent vantage point: he was close enough to understand the detail, data and ways in which both corporate and political decisions were made, and independent enough to be able to analyse what happened in a reasonably detached and cool way.
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