This is a superb article but it's scary how many of the points made apply directly to the US economy as well: zombie banks, real estate bubbles, a declining currency, faith in the bureaucrats and so on.
I think the underlying mechanism here is a centralized banking system in all three countries. Without getting into the religious discussion of whether a central bank is "right or "wrong", I would suggest that any system that relies on a small group of unelected humans making decisions on the supply of the underlying medium of exchange is imperfect and prone to favoring one group over another for reasons that are not positive for everyone.
In other words...we all agree that price fixing leads to either shortages or surpluses..but we all agree that fixing the price of money in a central bank is the right way to go. And we are not able to see the contradiction therein.
In the end it's a question of alternative mechanisms. Either we use the current system or we go with a "backed" medium of exchange. The "backed" version suffers from elasticity (but that may or may not be a good thing). So the issue becomes what are some other alternatives that aren't just derivative of the first two?
Fed's decade long easy money policy had a vitalizing effect on many businesses in many countries...Soon unfortunately we may get a zombie attack all over the world.
I believe the unstated goal of US monetary policy 2009-2013 was to fix the balance sheets of overlevereaged financial institutions by making borrowing very cheap. I think that policy goal is hidden and the cost to our economy is unknown.
I don't really see any mention of demographics in the article. The "boomer" swell explains a lot in all three of these economies (US, Japan, China). The US was just about 13 years behind Japan in terms of the peak of the boomers hitting their mid 40s (maximum earnings and spending). The Japanese hit stall and decline in the early 90s, and the USA did pretty much the same thing on cue in the early 2000s. China's demographic decline is going to be especially sharp.
