Japan looks towards "helicopter money"

Japan may be about to spearhead an even more radical monetary policy than quantitative easing: helicopter money.

Fifteen years ago a Japanese equity fund manager told me that Japan was merely "the dress rehearsal", while "the rest of the world will be the main event", says MoneyWeek's Tim Price in his PFP Wealth Management newsletter. He thought Japan was becoming "a giant laboratory experiment for novel monetary policies" that were going to spread to the rest of the world.

That seemed absurd back then, but "today, not so much". Quantitative easing (QE), or money printing, has indeed spread to other major developed economies. And now Japan may be about to spearhead an even more radical monetary policy: helicopter money.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.