Okay so the US doesn't like something about how Japan's economy was doing in the 90s, what was the beef? I know Japan was manufacturing a ton of stuff, but I thought the US wanted consumer products manufactured overseas.

So they're not happy with this, so they do a run on Japan's currency. What does this mean? Like how do they do it?

The run on the currency causes the value of the Yen to go up. This is bad for some reason, even though your currency is worth more? Like can't you get more for a Yen? But clearly it's bad because it destroyed their economy, I'd like to understand why or how.

Because right now the best I was able to explain it to someone was "America did some money magic bullshit and destroyed Japan's economy", but I would like to be able to answer some follow up questions.

  • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    That’s simply not true

    If the concept of money vanished overnight we would still be able to provide goods and services for each other. People lived for much much longer without the concept of money than with it. There’s no need to account for anything

    • CrimsonSage [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      That's not what I said. I said that just because money is a social construct doesn't mean it isn't real, it serves a very real function that has material impacts on the world and in this way we make it very real. Those societies did not use money in the modern sense with all the intricacies and nuance that this implies, but they did use some means of account to allocate labor and goods be it something abstract as socially recognized honor or a system of credit between people, otherwise there was no way to properly measure and distribute goods. Debt by Graber is a good primer on this, even hunter gatherer societies had systems of account.

      • Abraxiel
        ·
        2 years ago

        Money's first use was probably even as a material object that could serve as an accounting unit. This is why early currency was made of durable metals, which could be counted and set into piles to represent e.g. a measure of grain. It gets hard to remember how much you've got or to move it around on clay tablets, but coins you can just put into different piles and keep track of things.