Gabe Harris has an EXCELLENT overview of the Japanese economy over the past 50 years. The key thing to note is that:
1. The Japanese economy (as measured via GDP) was declining since the mid-1970s. This is counter-intuitive because of the runup of the Nikkei in the 1980s.
2. That the hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions of Yen) invested by the BOJ have not helped the Japanese economy one bit- mainly because the money isn’t going to the people- it is going to keep bad/corrupt businesses afloat.
The first thing I noticed when looking at this data was how the economic growth slowed dramatically in the 1980′s from near 13% down to around 6% average growth in GDP. While this was happening, bullish market participants where enjoying an insane market bubble. At the same time, government expenditures were growing at rates that were much faster than the GDP. However it takes time for the bureaucracy of a growing government to gain the power necessary to kill an economy. In this case it took about 40 years.
Same essay posted to SafeHaven.