Larry Summers Says U.S. Economy Now Confronts ‘Japanification’

(Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said the world’s largest economy now confronts a stagnation like Japan’s as government bond yields plunge to ultra-low levels.

“We’re essentially at the Japanese place,” Summers said in a Bloomberg Television interview Thursday. “That’s a place that’s very hard to get out of, as the Japanese experience suggests, and increasingly the European experience suggests.”

The spreading pandemic demands more aggressive action to avoid repeating the mistake of not injecting sufficient fiscal stimulus into the economy after Lehman Brothers failed.

“We cannot afford to wait six months now for fiscal stimulus for this economy,” he said. “We’re going to need bolder and more experimental approaches, and critically we’re going to need much more aggressive fiscal policy.”

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