Inoue, however, was still campaigning for a return to the gold standard when he was assassinated in 1932. Later that year, a leading bank director and Takahashi's prime minister were also assassinated. Austerity was racking up quite a body count. A decade of austerity had convinced the Japanese military that they were "at war with the entire civilian political elite." Even Takahashi, the architect of recovery, was first excluded from cabinet by the military when he began to argue that since the economy had recovered (by late 1934), it was time cool the spending and worry about inflation. Two years later, Takahashi was murdered, along with several other political figures, in another abortive coup in February 1936.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 543