Will a big shock help the world economy?

The European Central Bank is going to buy corporate bonds including those of Volkswagen AG, which cheated on its emissions tests and is facing billions of dollars in fines, and Telecom Italia, which Moody's and S&P regard as junk borrower. The ECB has been buying $90 billion of government bonds every month and analysts think that there are fewer bonds left to buy. Buying bonds by the central bank pushed yields down to 0.02% on German 10 year bonds. Recently, yields turned negative as fears of Brexit have grown. Compare that with a yield of 7.517% on benchmark 10 year bonds issued by the Government of India. The ECB cut interest rates to negative in 2014 and increased that to -0.40% in March of this year. The ECB wants European governments to increase spending to stimulate growth and increase prices but Germany is adamant in its refusal. In fact Germany is doing just the opposite by imposing severe austerity on countries whose economies are in recession, such as Greece. It is not just that German debts were written off by the Allied nations, it also gains because the common currency means that its goods are priced the same in 19 countries that have adopted the Euro and the weak Euro helps its exports so that it posted a record current account surplus of 30.4 billion Euros ($34.6 billion) in March, up from 21.1 billion Euros in February. The US feels that Germany is getting an unfair advantage from a weak Euro. The Bank of Japan also seems to be running out of government bonds to buy back in its program of quantitative easing and had introduced negative interest rates in January of this year. Japan's nominal GDP has been stuck at 500 trillion yen for about 25 years, which means it is stagnating but not contracting, as Brazil or Greece. Everything the government and central bank have tried has failed but it remains third richest country in the world, after the US and China. Of course, Japan is a small country with a homogeneous population, which is rapidly growing old because of very low birth rate, but a shrinking population means that per capita GDP is actually rising. When crisis hit Japan it was already a wealthy nation, whereas countries like China are caught in a middle income trap, the global economy was expanding, while now growth is anemic, and Japan was able to weaken the yen to increase exports, but now other countries are competing in weakening their currencies. The Federal Reserve in the US again kept rates on hold yesterday. Central banks cannot formulate policies, only governments can. But governments are constituted by politicians who are paralysed by the fear of losing elections. Experts keep on complaining but no one is listening. Perhaps a jolt, like the Brexit, will galvanise them. We'll see.