"The Princes of the Yen" by Richard Werner offers a fascinating window into the gears and levers the men held in shaping the Japanese economy from post-war to free markets.

It starts after WWII, when many of the pre-war leaders were reinstalled into their positions by the Americans. They then cloaked themselves inside the Bank of Japan within the Ministry of Finance. These men would rule over the interest rate into the new millennium, and their influence continues even today. The writer, Richard Werner, argues they intended a structural change in the Japanese economy by shaking out the old guards the bureaucratic class, the managerial class, and the shareholder class by raising interest rates, shoving loans on the Japanese people, and creating the famous 1980s bubble. The men who controlled the price of the Yen came from an elite cohort of educational backgrounds and were hand-picked over the course of their careers—most of them put on fast tracks to climb the corporate ladders.

I reflect on this and see similarities with the BOJ today, again raising interest rates, perhaps to reignite the Japanese economy. The past decade Japan saw negative interest rates! I’ve learned how sensitive all of these markets are to this rate and how they are all connected complicitly—whether that's the futures contracts or the news media sifting through sentiment. But behind the daily noise, there are central banks calculating moves that can shape the nature of a society—all while being unelected by the very people they serve