A decade ago, I was working as a reporter in Tokyo when I was asked to investigate the impact of Japanese-style quantitative easing. Back then, the Bank of Japan was pouring gazillions of yen into the money markets and politicians were angrily exhorting the Japanese banks to lend.
Indeed, at one point, the Tokyo government even created quotas, which stipulated that banks should make a certain level of loans to worthy small enterprises to combat a pernicious credit crunch.
But, when I examined what the Japanese banks were actually doing, the results were almost comical. In public the banks claimed they were lending to small enterprises; in reality some were only meeting the targets by lending to subsidiaries of Toyota.
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