Japan's stock market finally pulls out of a slump that lasted more than a generation.

I'm David Brancaccio in New York, a milestone today in Japan after more than three decades, the key stock indicator for the Japanese market

the Nik 225 hit a new high if you are 33 years old or so you have never seen a

Japanese market this high.

Diane Swogg, chief economist at the audit tax and advisory firm KPMG, remembers the bubble

that preceded a slump of a generation and a half.

I remember when, you know, we were worried that Japan Inc was the name on books and on the

titles of magazine covers that they were going to overtake the US and you know, they

own things like Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach I mean they're

buying these high properties and then they burst their bubble went into the end of a bubble that

was much worse than anything we saw after the global financial crisis in terms of duration.

It went on for decades of stagnation, disinflation.

I have a friend of mine who's an economist in Japan and he was hoping that his children

would be able to see with the renewed bit of inflation in Japan actual wage gains instead of wage cuts in their lifetime.

It's interesting and part of what happened with taking Japan so long to move its way forward after that bubble is something

that the US faces, which is demography.

We have an older population and as people retire, they're out of the main wage and

tax-paying parts of their lives.

Exactly and in fact the demographic shift in Japan hit them much sooner than it

hit us we're bumping up against it now with the baby boom

aging into retirement. It really sapped their labor force growth and economic growth is

just a combination of two very simple things.

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