ファイナンス 2017年7月号 Vol.53 No.4

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Wall Street and cybersecurity have been favor-ite themes of the US elections and the Con-gressional debate while Fintech is highlighted as a promising area to improve nancial inclu-sion at G20 and FSB. What do you think of the role of the nancial sector, in terms of its op-portunities to contribute to sustainable growth and its risks to exacerbate social instability?▷Mr. Kindred：　So, I think that having a well-functioning nancial system is essential to both financial stability and economic growth. The financial system needs to work well. It needs to be efficient, encourage innovation and enable that innovation to be deployed for customer satisfaction and client service in ef-fective ways.Also it needs to be regulated in a way that recognizes the potential for excess, which can exist in any activity. We saw going into the -nancial crisis of ten years ago that excesses got out of control in the nancial sector. And many of the responses to that through regulation, the core pillars of that response, I think have been eective. But often, as is the case when an ex-cess happens, there’s often an excessive reac-tion.But I believe that the world needs intermedi-aries to bridge providers of capital and users of capital in an ecient way. Because the world is globally connected, those financial institu-tions need to function on a global basis in the context of frameworks that recognize the glob-al nature in what our clients require.So, harmonization of global regulations, which recognizes the need to balance stability and growth objectives, is important. And the -nancial sector will be adopting the digital tools that are evolving in today’s rapidly advancing technology sphere to better provide customer satisfaction and client service and ensure the capital gets to places where it can be deployed for eective benet and growth of the overall economy.Opportunities and Risks of Japan▶Mr. Kanda：　You’ve lived in and watched Japan for quite a long time. Japan is facing a decreasing and aging population and an un-precedented accumulation of fiscal deficit at the midst of the even more competitive global market and destabilizing international politics. Indeed the Japanese potential growth ratio has been close to zero for a long time while it still enjoys the highest level of science and technol-ogy, culture, as well as public safety among others. How do you analyze the pros and cons, and, opportunity and risk of Japanese society in the future?▷Mr. Kindred：　I think Japan has a wonder-ful society right now. The rule of law, the cali-ber of education, the quality of infrastructure, the advancement in science, the construction standards, so many things of excellence and those are a real demonstration of the achieve-ment of the country over this past period of time.As you noted, the critical issue facing Japan is the demographic prole. And that is a huge issue. Growth over time is a function mathe-matically of labor supply and total factor pro-ductivity. So, if labor supply is going down at a pace equivalent to the projected demographic change, in order to maintain the same level of economic output, the country will have to have tremendous advances in total factor productiv-ity. So, those things together need to be as-sessed very carefully.I commend the Abenomics policy mix, and we discussed this many times. I think “the three arrows” are very powerful if deployed in a complementary and consistent manner. And so, I am of the view that that’s the right pre-scription. But even with very active deployment of those three arrows, I think it’s still a very dif-ficult hill to climb because the demographic prole is so severe. But, I think the labor force participation changes witnessed under Abeno-36ファイナンス　2017.7連 載｜超有識者場外ヒアリング