Word: japanized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Figures released this week indicated Japan may be climbing out of its worst recession in decades. Third quarter GDP growth came in at an annualized rate of 4.8%. But other statistics painted a more troubling picture. The price of goods and services slid by 2.6% in the third quarter, the biggest drop since 1958. Consumer prices have dropped for seven straight months. "The recent price falls are not right and worrisome," Japan's Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said at a Nov. 20 press conference. "This is one of the major policy issues right now." Deputy Prime Minister Naoto...
...Japan's central bank has dismissed the possibility the country could enter a deflationary death spiral. On Friday, the Bank of Japan upgraded its outlook for the Japanese economy and left interest rates at 0.1%. "The BOJ doesn't want to take any aggressive policy measures because it doesn't think the status quo is so harmful," says Kanno of JPMorgan Securities. (Read "Japan's Government: Five Ways to Fix the Economy...
...Jesper Koll, president and CEO of Tantallon Research Japan, argues that when falling prices are factored in, the country's nascent recovery is weaker than recent positive GDP growth numbers suggest. "We've got the consumer price index falling by 2.5%, wages falling by about 2.0%, winter bonuses falling by about 14%, and the Nikkei (stock market index) going down," he says. "All the growth we're seeing is because of arithmetic." Complicating matters is the strength of the Japanese yen, which has gained 6% on the dollar in the last three months. Prices generally decline in a strong currency...
...Tsukuba's business school in Tokyo, points to a now familiar Keynesian solution to deflation: more fiscal stimulus. But he says additional government spending is constrained by the country's already high debt load, which is approaching 200% of GDP. "Even if the DPJ (the Democratic Party of Japan, the country's ruling party) decided that their principle policy objective would be to end deflation," he says, "it's not quite clear to me how they'd go about...
...consumers on products such as household items. Ultimately, though, he says deflation is a symptom, not a cause, of fundamental economic ills. "You want to treat the underlying cause and that is declining economic vitality, such as not enough investment in new companies, etc." In other words, if Japan can make progress in overcoming its chronic economic malaise, deflation will eventually disappear without a direct attack by policymakers...