The Plaza Accord aimed to stop Japan becoming a rival rentier nation

Evidence

While the Plaza Accord did succeed in devaluing the dollar vis-à-vis the yen by more than 50% (within two years of its signing), the Accord’s real purpose was subtler: the aim was, at least in part, to prevent Japan from becoming a rentier nation in opposition to US rentier capitalism. As the yen climbed, the Japanese economy went into a sustained slowdown. In response, Japan’s central bank pumped a lot of new money into Japan’s banks, causing massive bubbles to build up in real estate. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 964

Categorization

• XREF: Reinterprets a canonical economic-history event (Plaza Accord) through the rent-versus-capital lens, connecting to the reader’s whole platform-feudalism thesis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 964