�Kevin Buckland, Shigeki Nozawa, and Kazumi Miura

titled “Understand Negative Rates in 5 Minutes,” a dialogue between a hypothetical questioner and a BOJ official. Asked if negative rates would hurt consumption, the representative says, “If you’d put 1 million yen in the bank for a year, you would have got 200 yen in interest. Now, it’s 10 yen. This isn’t enough to damage consumption, now, is it?”

Consumption is still pretty damaged. Household spending dropped 0.4 percent in April after recording a 5.3 percent slump in March, the most in a year. Consumer prices have stagnated. The proportion of people expecting prices to be higher a year from now shrank to the lowest level in three years, according to a BOJ survey.

Monetary stimulus has also failed to ignite wage pressure, with average earnings not rising as much as 1 percent in any month since 1997. “I can’t picture that the economy is getting any better,” says securityconscious Sato.

“No one in North Korea understands the economy better than Pak. Feeding the people has paramount importance in Kim’s campaign to legitimize his power, and he is relying on Pak to do that” The bottom line Japanese are showing their belief that deflation is here to stay, by withdrawing cash from banks that pay almost zero interest.