Richard Koo

Richard Koo (Chinese辜朝明, Pinyin Gū Chaoming, Japaneseリチャード·クー; * 1954 in Kobe ) is a Taiwanese economist. He is chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, which is one of the Nomura Holdings. Koo is an expert on economic research and coined the term " balance sheet recession " ( "balance sheet recession ").

Koo graduated from the University of California (Berkeley ) and received his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. He then worked for the Federal Reserve Bank ( NY). In 1984 he moved to the Nomura Research Institute.

Koo has dealt intensively with the consequences of the bursting of the credit bubble in Japan in 1990. According to Koo, it took Japan 15 years to the private sector contributed to the Japanese growth, as the Japanese government in 1997 reduced government spending in accordance with the recommendations of the IMF, which caused a recession. Japan's recession has shown that in such crisis situations, companies are not trying to maximize profit, but to minimize debt in order to increase their credit worthiness.

Koo takes the position that in the wake of the financial crisis, the State must ensure, through investment for growth, as the private sector save date. In addition, the savings in schools and in the research would have serious consequences for future generations. There was for the U.S. economy, the risk that reducing government spending years of deflation and recession like in Japan could be the result. Koo said that several industrialized nations, especially the United States and Europe due to the financial crisis in a similar situation be as it was in the 1990 Japan and the risk of deflation and years of recession for this exists (see also: Investment case ).

The title of his last book, The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan's Great Recession, is a reference to a statement that Ben Bernanke met in 1995: "To understand the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics.

A balance sheet recession is by Koo a downturn of the economy an economy that followed the bursting of a real estate or stock market bubble, and no cyclical nature of the contraction phase.