Your correspondent Leo Lewis has long argued, with admirable consistency but little discernible success, that Japan’s economy and corporate sector would be more successful if they became more American.

Rather oddly the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank had him returning to his theme (Opinion, March 16).

He always argues his case well and it is not without merit, but I do feel he is fighting the last war. If there was a time when Japan might have gone “the full Friedman” it was in the 1990s — the much admired Japanese model had imploded and the case for wholesale reform seemed, briefly, irresistible.

But it was resisted and although there have been some important changes to the model over the intervening decades, the global crises which clearly originated in the US (the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000 and all the unpleasantness of 2008-09) will have understandably weakened the appetite for further change.

If SVB does trigger another global banking crisis (which I doubt) this appetite will evaporate altogether.

Such a development would reinforce my belief that the future belongs to economic systems that further the broader interests of stakeholders (of which Japan is one example among many) rather than those that promote the narrower interests of shareholders (of which the US is probably the prime example).

Jonathan Allum
Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK