I recommend reading the sources I listed in my initial comment (they are written by senior leadership and advisors at the BoJ from that era).
Furthermore, these are all texts that are expected reading in any upper level Asian Economics class.
> leading to a brief period of cheap and easy money that completely destroyed the remarkably solid and sustainable economy Japan had built post-war
The biggest cause was bad loan issues caused by lack of auditing and due dilligence. [0]
In that era, the BoJ would set a quota on loan origination (called a window guidance) that Japanese banks needed to meet (p.s. China used to do the same thing til 2015 which is a major reason for China's current real estate crisis)
The Plaza Accord would not have had as severe an impact if Japan's Window Guidance policy didn't incentivize business loans with minimal due diligence.
> Post-war ... purging them from their companies
And they completely reconstituted themselves in the 1950s by adopting the Keiretsu corporate structure where a single asset management firm controls all the broken off assets of the initial zaibatsu.
This is what Mitsui, Sumimito, Mitsubishi, Fuyo, etc did.
Take a look at NYT reporting about this from 1954 [1]
Japan also does not have a wealth tax.
> This left much of Japan's industry essentially controlled by the government
Japan always had a high amount of government intervention in it's economy.
MITI was the driver of Japanese industrial policy.
I recommend reading "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" (1982) by Chalmers Johnson to dig deeper into the history of interventionism in the Japanese model [2]
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While the Plaza Accord did have a significant impact on the Japanese economy, the recent politically driven "pop econ" Plaza Accord view needs to die [3]
Like anything else that's pop-anything, it's so broadstrokes that it's bordering on misinformation.
Furthermore, these are all texts that are expected reading in any upper level Asian Economics class.
> leading to a brief period of cheap and easy money that completely destroyed the remarkably solid and sustainable economy Japan had built post-war
The biggest cause was bad loan issues caused by lack of auditing and due dilligence. [0]
In that era, the BoJ would set a quota on loan origination (called a window guidance) that Japanese banks needed to meet (p.s. China used to do the same thing til 2015 which is a major reason for China's current real estate crisis)
The Plaza Accord would not have had as severe an impact if Japan's Window Guidance policy didn't incentivize business loans with minimal due diligence.
> Post-war ... purging them from their companies
And they completely reconstituted themselves in the 1950s by adopting the Keiretsu corporate structure where a single asset management firm controls all the broken off assets of the initial zaibatsu.
This is what Mitsui, Sumimito, Mitsubishi, Fuyo, etc did.
Take a look at NYT reporting about this from 1954 [1]
Japan also does not have a wealth tax.
> This left much of Japan's industry essentially controlled by the government
Japan always had a high amount of government intervention in it's economy.
MITI was the driver of Japanese industrial policy.
I recommend reading "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" (1982) by Chalmers Johnson to dig deeper into the history of interventionism in the Japanese model [2]
-------------
While the Plaza Accord did have a significant impact on the Japanese economy, the recent politically driven "pop econ" Plaza Accord view needs to die [3]
Like anything else that's pop-anything, it's so broadstrokes that it's bordering on misinformation.
[0] - https://www.imes.boj.or.jp/research/papers/english/me19-s1-1...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1954/07/17/archives/japan-again-plan...
[2] - https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2791
[3] - https://www.imf.org/-/media/Websites/IMF/imported-flagship-i...