Princes of the Yen is not just about post-war Japan, but a tale of bankster manipulation.
What was a working system became a synthetic bubble trouble.
Some lessons for crypto in there too. Enforcing monetary policy that expands the money supply without being based on any relationship with value means that that money will inflate the value of whatever it can find. So long as outsiders don't notice, that money is worth more than it should compared to other currencies. The same scam has been used by the USA, then Japan, Europe, now China, and probably many other countries.
The key metric that heralds the bursting of a monetary bubble is the ratio of unproductive loans to productive loans. The distinction is between loans that generate real wealth that is used to repay the debt, compared to those based on nothing but the desire to buy some inflated asset, such as consumer goods and housing.
The evil that is currently being perpetrated around the world, is to look at that ratio in another way; destroy the productive capacity of small businesses, so they go bankrupt, so their assets can be bought on the cheap by corporate behemoths that have prepared themselves for this synthetic implosion. The creation of a fearful slave class is making this process easier. Too late to be prepared - maybe some can still manage it.
The long con worked. In 1998 the Bank of Japan became "independent" - welcome to the global cartel of banksters. Same shit as happened in the USA - a synthetic banking crisis created by the banksters to hoodwink the politicians and people.
Still works.