Banking on ‘Green Swans’
ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON A DECADE AGO, CRISIS struck Japan. First came a 9.1-magnitude earthquake, the country’s largest ever recorded. That triggered a massive tsunami, which washed away entire towns. The tsunami then caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo.
Immediate human toll aside, the disasters also threatened to plunge the world’s third largest economy into crisis. Masaaki Shirakawa, then head of the Bank of Japan, scrambled his proverbial jets. The bank doubled its bond and asset purchases, and pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the market to ensure that banks could keep lending. Working with other
