Daily Inspiration Quote by Toshihiko Fukui

The sentence reads like central-banker Esperanto: careful, bloodless, and quietly accusatory. Fukui isn’t diagnosing Japan’s “lost decades” as a mystery or a moral failing. He’s narrowing the field of acceptable explanations to something technocratic and, crucially, actionable: the problem is adjustment. Not catastrophe, not culture, not fate.

“Relative prices” is the tell. It’s a macroeconomist’s way of saying the economy’s internal compass got scrambled: what labor costs relative to capital, what domestic goods cost relative to imports, what real estate costs relative to everything else. When those signals shift - after an asset bubble bursts, after globalization bites, after demographics turn - an economy has to reprice, reallocate, and let some sectors shrink so others can grow. Fukui’s phrase “incomplete economic adjustments” implies Japan tried to keep yesterday’s structure on life support: banks slow to recognize losses, firms protected from exit, wages and services sticky, zombie businesses lingering. The subtext is that stagnation isn’t just weak demand; it’s misallocated resources and delayed restructuring.

The intent is also institutional. As a public servant and former Bank of Japan governor, Fukui is staking a position in a long-running policy argument: monetary easing alone can’t fix a real-economy mismatch. This kind of line is a polite push for reforms that are politically radioactive - bankruptcies, labor mobility, deregulation - while sounding neutral enough to pass as mere analysis. It’s accountability without naming names, a diagnosis that makes policy feel inevitable rather than chosen.