-->What is the relevance of the Japanese experience for the rest of the world? Japan is not
dealing with a “Japanese crisis” as is typically described in the Western media, but rather
with a structural world crisis that chronologically happens to have first hit Japan. In other
words, the over-hyped “Information Age” or “Knowledge Age” also has as underbelly
the “end of the Industrial Age”. The opening of China - which is now sucking in the bulk
of the new investments in plant and equipment in Asia - has simply accelerated and made
obvious a trend that was unavoidable anyway. The last time that a shift of such a
magnitude occurred was when the Industrial Age precipitated the end of the Agrarian
Age. Such shifts are not painless: remember what happened to the farmers when the
agrarian age was ending; or the landed gentry that saw their values, power and traditions
fade into irrelevancy.
International Journal of Community Currency Research. Vol.8, pp.1-23
22
If this interpretation is valid, then the rest of the “industrialized world” better take notice.
Europe has been expecting to re-launch its economy for a decade, without much success:
unemployment there is stubbornly stuck at its highest level in the post-war period. The
classical European recipe has been to do “a little more like the US” and hope that
everything will return into normal gear. But after the US itself has seen the bursting of its
own high tech bubble, those hopes look rather vain. Slowly Europeans are nowadays
waking up that what happened in Japan may also happen in Germany and other parts of
Europe. The specter of deflation - a systemic sign of overcapacity across the board - is
now for the first time considered a serious possibility outside of Japanviii.
We can expect the US to follow a similar path of denial particularly in an election year,
repeating the mantra that the Japanese have heard for fourteen years: “next year, the
economy will be back to normal.” It is under this light that what is going on in Japan in
the domain of complementary currencies is relevant for the rest of the world. The second
largest economy of the world has turned itself into a real-life laboratory for resolving a
variety of economic and social problems from the bottom up, thanks to monetary
innovations. Can the rest of the world afford not to learn from those experiments?

<ul> ~ Complementary currencies in Japan</ul>

-->>What is the relevance of the Japanese experience for the rest of the world? Japan is not
>dealing with a “Japanese crisis” as is typically described in the Western media, but rather
>with a structural world crisis that chronologically happens to have first hit Japan. In other
>words, the over-hyped “Information Age” or “Knowledge Age” also has as underbelly
>the “end of the Industrial Age”. The opening of China - which is now sucking in the bulk
>of the new investments in plant and equipment in Asia - has simply accelerated and made
>obvious a trend that was unavoidable anyway. The last time that a shift of such a
>magnitude occurred was when the Industrial Age precipitated the end of the Agrarian
>Age. Such shifts are not painless: remember what happened to the farmers when the
>agrarian age was ending; or the landed gentry that saw their values, power and traditions
>fade into irrelevancy.
>International Journal of Community Currency Research. Vol.8, pp.1-23
>22
>If this interpretation is valid, then the rest of the “industrialized world” better take notice.
>Europe has been expecting to re-launch its economy for a decade, without much success:
>unemployment there is stubbornly stuck at its highest level in the post-war period. The
>classical European recipe has been to do “a little more like the US” and hope that
>everything will return into normal gear. But after the US itself has seen the bursting of its
>own high tech bubble, those hopes look rather vain. Slowly Europeans are nowadays
>waking up that what happened in Japan may also happen in Germany and other parts of
>Europe. The specter of deflation - a systemic sign of overcapacity across the board - is
>now for the first time considered a serious possibility outside of Japanviii.
>We can expect the US to follow a similar path of denial particularly in an election year,
>repeating the mantra that the Japanese have heard for fourteen years: “next year, the
>economy will be back to normal.” It is under this light that what is going on in Japan in
>the domain of complementary currencies is relevant for the rest of the world. The second
>largest economy of the world has turned itself into a real-life laboratory for resolving a
>variety of economic and social problems from the bottom up, thanks to monetary
>innovations. Can the rest of the world afford not to learn from those experiments?

<ul> ~ Regionalwährungen</ul>