Americans Would Be Lucky to Mimic 1990s Japan

... the U.S. can only wish that its own “lost decade” would go as smoothly as Japan’s. It’s highly doubtful that the U.S.’s experience would be as stable as Japan’s.

Households in Japan were sitting on trillions of dollars of savings; Americans aren’t. Japan began its crisis as a creditor nation; the U.S. is a decidedly debtor nation. Japan doesn’t rely heavily on foreign capital to finance imbalances; the U.S., with its gaping current-account deficit, does.

Global growth also softened Japan’s slide. In the late 1990s, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was referring to the U.S. as an “oasis of prosperity” during Asia’s crisis. Today, there’s no such source of growth as the biggest economies fall. Exports won’t bail the U.S. out the way they did Japan.