For the world's largest economies, barring the United States, just registering positive GDP growth is proving to be a challenge, even with near-zero interest rates. Investment gurus may be confidently predicting a rate hike for the US economy, but even if that comes to pass as is likely, the US economy is not exactly fighting fit. Third-quarter corporate data in the US showed that profits had gone into negative territory and inventories were increasing. One can't help feeling that the US Federal Reserve's likely decision to raise rates will be driven in some part by the embarrassment that would result if the world's most-watched central bank blinked again. But, ahead of next week's decision by the US Fed, leading economic commentators are already lining up to remind the US Fed that the Bank of Japan raised rates thrice prematurely - in 2000, 2006 and 2007 - and was forced to reverse course.
This year was thought to be the year when the world economy might exorcise the ghosts of Lehman Brothers and "QE" might go back to being an acronym for the world's largest cruise ship. This year was when the developed world was supposed to move towards a more familiar monetary policy, where interest rates did not hover close to zero and GDP growth was not an endangered species. Instead, as experience shows in the euro zone, which continued with quantitative easing last week, the developed world looks more and more like Japan a quarter-century after the bubble burst. Even in the US, the case for raising rates is very mixed, seven years after Lehman. The conventional reason for raising rates - to head off inflation - is hardly a threat to the US economy, even if asset inflation in its metropolitan property markets is a worry.
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Japan has long seemed an outlier in the world - and in the world economy. Now, as the developed world grapples with overcoming what appears to be a low-intensity semi-recession in perpetuity coupled with an aging population in places like Europe, Japan finds itself something of a role model - albeit of a decidedly dubious sort. Economists' epithets such as "balance sheet recession" - quoted by David Pilling in his wise and wide-ranging analysis of Japan, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival - to describe companies that were once massively indebted that no longer have the will to invest, apply to the rest of the world as well. Even the developing world's supposed poster-boys, China and India. "Even those that have managed to restore healthy balance sheets are so traumatised, they have no more desire to borrow or invest. Their unwillingness to borrow makes conventional monetary policy useless," writes Mr Pilling, before going on to quote an economist who likens Japan's repeated attempts since 1990 to kickstart the economy through monetary expansion as being akin to offering endless free beers to customers who are so drunk they simply can't drink anymore.
Yet, the clamour for growth never lets up. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe even set a numerical target for 20 per cent growth in Japan's nominal GDP, which would take it to 600 trillion yen from the levels it has been stuck at for the past two decades. As recently as Monday, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda was ruling out the need for negative interest rates in response to the media seeking another boost for the Japanese economy. Admittedly, Japan's long-awaited increase in corporate investment that contributed to positive growth in the third quarter overshadowed the fact that inventories in that country are piling up. Mr Abe would like corporations to invest more and raise salaries - but even though they enjoy buoyant profits, they do not see demand picking up enough to justify doing so.
Which leads us to what appears to be a global demand problem, both at a household and macro level. China, the biggest buyer of them all of commodities such as iron ore and copper, is seeing its economy slowing - imports declined by 8.7 per cent last month. Every country it trades with is feeling the effects. David Mann, chief economist of Standard Chartered, calculates that China's share of global GDP growth had risen to 30 per cent in 2014, while that of the US was a mere 16 per cent by comparison. Mr Mann makes the point that if China slowed from its official rate of 6.8 per cent, "the impact on Asia is greater." Less diplomatic observers believe China is already growing at half its official rate.
Mr Abe has more experience than most at wrestling with this seemingly impossible turnaround the world has faced since 2008. In addition to soft loans for a bullet train and, one hopes, mandatory instructions for the bosses of Toyota, Suzuki and Honda's Indian counterparts to raise emission standards for the vehicles they sell in India to international levels by 2017, Mr Abe may well have useful advice when he arrives on Friday. We should pay attention. As a Credit Suisse report underlines, most of India's infrastructure companies are so heavily indebted that eight years after Lehman, their interest coverage ratios are worsening rather than improving as they sell healthy assets to reduce debt. Even without the legendary Japanese sense of discipline and respect for the environment, in that limited sense, we are all Japanese now.