I’ve been pleasantly surprised that some of my most popular posts are excerpts from the only history book I ever wrote, Panic, Prosperity, and Progress. Over this holiday weekend, I’ll be sharing, over the course of four days, the chapter dedicated to the inflation and bursting of the Japanese bubble of the 1980s. I think you’ll find some interesting parallels with China.

As the summer came to a close in 1945, Japan lay in ruins. It had spent the past five years at war, and the nation had been assaulted by an unrelenting fire-bombing campaign, climaxed, of course, by the only two nuclear weapons ever dropped on humans in world history. Japan, once with dreams of Pacific-wide domination, was now one of the poorest and most-devastated nations on Earth.