金融危機の経験者として日本が伝えるべき教訓とは

●David K. Levine, “More financial crisis stuff”（Against Monopoly, October 26, 2008）

So what is my creative plan for dealing with the mess? The goal seems surely to be first and foremost to avoid doing things that will make things worse, and second not inventing new and crazier plans every day - as Poulson spent several weeks doing - but to try to understand what plans might have actually worked in the past. In the last several weeks I've learned what did work in Chile and what didn't work in Japan. There is evidence in both cases that fixing the banking sector led to recovery of the real sector - although as usual cause and effect are hard to distinguish: the reforms may have worked because the real sector was recovering anyway. But there is no reason not to fix the financial sector. We know what the problem is: allowing failed managers of zombie banks to maintain fictitious balance sheets. As long as this continues nobody is going to be eager to lend to the banking sector. The solution is straightforward - the managers who incurred the losses need to be fired, and the losses clearly assigned to share-holders, bond-holders, and tax-payers. This is what the private sector would do in the absence of government regulation. It can be done in the current regulatory regime by forcing banks into bankruptcy by enforcing existing regulations (i.e. mark to market enforced ruthlessly), but bankruptcy proceedings are not an expeditious way to restructure the banking sector. In Chile they nationalized the banks, fired the managers, restructured the debt apportioning the losses, then sold the newly recapitalized banks back to the private sector. If we want to fix the financial sector here we need to do the same. Or we can follow the Japanese model - spend $400 billion buying preferred share in banks, and then wait and pray. The Japanese waited nearly a decade before they finally gave up and passed a law offering the opportunity to accountants who claimed firms were solvent to go to jail when it turned out they weren't.

金融危機→実体経済の落ち込み（＝不況）という因果関係を当然視することに疑問を提示しつつ、金融セクターが抱える問題を解決することそれ自体は重要な政策問題である、と。金融危機に対処するに当たっては新奇な政策処方箋を探し求めるよりも、まずは過去の経験を振り返ってどういった対処法が成功し（成功例としてのチリ）、どういった対処法が失敗したか（失敗例としての日本）を学ぶことが必要である、と。
引用した文章の最後あたり、「If we want to fix the financial sector here we need to do the same. Or we can follow the Japanese model（金融セクターの問題を解決したいのであればチリが採用したタイプの処理方法に従う必要がある。日本式の処理法を採用するというのも考えられなくはないけれども。）」は日本式の処理方法を薦めているわけではないことは確かであろう（日本は失敗例として挙げられているのだから）。あくまでも日本の経験は反面教師として学ぶべきなのであって、「日本の真似、ダメ絶対！」なのである。決して大きな面して誇らしげに語れるような経験ではないであろう。

韓リフ先生も先日取り上げてらっしゃったけれども、Kehoe, Chari, and Christiano論文はしっかりとおさえておきたいところ。