"Well-functioning financial systems are important in achieving sustained economic growth. They play a crucial role in channeling household savings into the corporate sector and allocating investment funds among firms"
About this Quote
A central banker’s ideal sentence is one that sounds like physics: calm, neutral, inevitable. Fukui’s formulation does that work perfectly. By calling “well-functioning financial systems” “important” to “sustained” growth, he isn’t describing a hope so much as laying down a policy premise: stability is not a luxury, it’s infrastructure. The diction is technocratic, but the intent is political. If finance is the plumbing of the economy, then the people who regulate the pipes get to claim they’re merely preventing leaks.
The subtext sits in the verbs: “channeling” and “allocating.” Households don’t just save; their savings are routed. Firms don’t just invest; capital is distributed among them, implying winners, losers, and an arbiter. That arbiter is the financial system as designed and supervised by the state and its institutions. Fukui is quietly arguing against a romantic view of markets as self-organizing and against a populist view of finance as purely extractive. He’s positioning finance as a public good when it behaves properly.
Context matters: Fukui’s career is bound up with Japan’s long struggle after the asset bubble burst, when “malfunctioning” finance (bad loans, zombie firms, risk aversion) clogged precisely the channels he celebrates. Read through that lens, the quote is a corrective to the lost decade’s lesson: growth isn’t just about innovation or exports; it’s about whether savings can move, cleanly and credibly, to productive risk-taking. The line is also an implicit warning: when those channels seize up, the economy doesn’t just slow - it ossifies.
The subtext sits in the verbs: “channeling” and “allocating.” Households don’t just save; their savings are routed. Firms don’t just invest; capital is distributed among them, implying winners, losers, and an arbiter. That arbiter is the financial system as designed and supervised by the state and its institutions. Fukui is quietly arguing against a romantic view of markets as self-organizing and against a populist view of finance as purely extractive. He’s positioning finance as a public good when it behaves properly.
Context matters: Fukui’s career is bound up with Japan’s long struggle after the asset bubble burst, when “malfunctioning” finance (bad loans, zombie firms, risk aversion) clogged precisely the channels he celebrates. Read through that lens, the quote is a corrective to the lost decade’s lesson: growth isn’t just about innovation or exports; it’s about whether savings can move, cleanly and credibly, to productive risk-taking. The line is also an implicit warning: when those channels seize up, the economy doesn’t just slow - it ossifies.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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