In September 1985, the finance ministers of the G-5 nations—the United States, Japan, West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—signed the Plaza Accord at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The agreement was designed to depreciate the U.S. dollar against the yen and the deutsche mark in order to reduce the massive U.S. trade deficit. The accord led to a sharp appreciation of the yen, which eventually contributed to the Japanese asset price bubble and its subsequent collapse.

The Plaza Accord was a watershed in global economic governance, and its consequences were reflected in the literature of the 1980s and 1990s. Japanese poets and novelists explored the social and psychological effects of the bubble economy, while American writers used the accord as a symbol of the shifting balance of global power, themes that appear in the poetry of the period.