Foreign Investors Buy Into the Japanese Recovery

Foreign investors buy into the Japanese recovery, but the Japanese themselves apparently don't, or at least if they do its's on nothing like the same scale. More to add to the puzzle I was getting at in my last post about how people seem to find all this so hard to understand or accept. Denial, what denial!Foreign buying of Japanese stocks has reached a record level as global investors buy into

Here We Go Again!

Well yet another consumption driven recovery seems to be grinding to a halt in Japan. The only thing which puzzles me is why people continue to be surprised, and why people fail to see the similarieties between Japan and Germany in this regard. It's an up-hill (rather than a flat) world obviously:Japan’s “Warm Biz” campaign, which should have boosted the sale of warm winter clothes, has failed to

Good News, Now Let Battle Commence!

Most commentators are getting excited about the recent reading on the Japanese core consumer prices index which stopped falling in October. There is just one small snag, the core CPI in Japan - until next August - still includes oil and energy costs. Stripped of these it is estimated that the underlying CPI was still down by about 0.3 per cent. The reading does however mark the first 'near miss'

An Orderly Withdrawal?

On one version of events the Bank of Japan is simply dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's on it road map to exit the massive monetary easing process sometime during the next six months. On another the road itself is fraught with difficulty, and an overly 'inflation wary' central bank might risk upsetting the whole apple cart if it proceeds to rapidly. It is this tension which seems to be

Japan Continues To Grow

I think there is a pretty fair and balanced assessment of the current Japan situation by David Turner in today's FT. He makes the following points:1/. Japan’s economy continued to grow slowly but surely in the third quarter, supported by heavy investment by companies and moderate growth in consumer spending.2/. The world’s second largest economy was expanding despite a negative contribution from

Don't Speak To Soon

Don't Speak To SoonI have been arguing continuously for some months now that Japan might not escape the deflation trap so easily as some seem to imagine. Today there are two pieces of news which should at least give the 'optimists' some pause for thought.Firstly the news that Japan's economy most likely slowed in the third quarter, with one of the principal explanations being the lack of dynamism