It's no secret that Japan is in the midst of what is perhaps the greatest (or most terrible, depending on whether you have a penchant for Keynesian madness or not) monetary experiment the world has ever known. With the blessing of PM Shinzo Abe and under the heavy hand of Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, the BoJ is printing enough money to monetize not only the entirety of JGB gross issuance, but also the entire Japanese ETF market, with the latter effort serving to underwrite record highs on the Nikkei.
In sum, the printing presses are working around the clock in Japan and as WSJ reports [6], when the government finally gets what it wants and the country's descent into the Keynesian Twilight Zone finally ends in the worst example of hyperinflation the world has ever seen, no one will be forced to use a wheelbarrow to cart their yen around because in the new paranormal, you use exoskeletons to move your worthless fiat currency:
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., the core banking unit of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., said Thursday it has rented eight robotic suits developed by Japanese robotic maker Cyberdyne Inc. to ease the burden on the employees delivering cash. The bank says that would be a first among Japanese financial institutions.
“There have been many cases when a physical burden was placed on senior employees carrying heavy parcels of bank notes and coins. By adopting Cyberdyne’s robotic suits, we can help reduce that burden,” said Tomoyuki Narita, a spokesman at SMBC, Japan’s second-largest bank by assets after Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.
SMBC Delivery Service Co., which mainly collects and delivers cash between bank outlets, has approximately 1,600 workers and about 16% of them are over age 65. “We are currently placing the robotic suits at four outposts” of the delivery service, “but we’ll consider adding them in more places including the bank’s branches after assessing the effects,” Mr. Narita said.
He said the Hybrid Assistive Limb or HAL suit could reduce the burden of carrying a heavy object by about 40%, so that carrying a 10-kilogram container of bank notes and coins would feel like six kilograms...
The robotics company shares a name with the fictional defense firm behind Skynet, the artificial intelligence system that turned Earth into an apocalyptic wasteland in the Terminator series.
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Welcome to the future...
[7]
