Posted on 02/10/2009 8:35:02 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Japan faces ‘unimaginable’ contraction
By Mure Dickie in Tokyo
Published: February 9 2009 15:04 | Last updated: February 9 2009 18:46
Japan’s economy faces an “unimaginable” contraction, the chief economist of its central bank warned on Monday, as figures revealed surging bankruptcies and a big fall in machinery orders.
The warning from Kazuo Momma, head of the Bank of Japan’s research and statistics department, underscored the gloom surrounding the world’s second-largest economy as export orders dry up, companies shut down production lines and consumers stop spending.
Japan, where industrial output plunged a record 9.6 per cent month on month in December, is due to announce fourth-quarter gross domestic product data next week. Polls of economists suggest GDP will have fallen more than 3 per cent compared with the previous quarter – an annualised decline of more than 10 per cent.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
Get that man a BRO right away!
Our “exchange daughter” (former high school exchange student, now grown-up college student) will be here in a week’s time to spend a month with us. News like this makes me want to beg her to stay. Things may be bad in the US but here in Texas there’s plenty of farmland and oil and gas; even if the crap really hits the fan, we’ll get by. Japan, on the other hand, is a chain of rocky islands with little arable land and no oil whatsoever. I feel she’s safer here with us.
Of course, she has a real, biological family back in Japan, and I suppose they (and we) will muddle through somehow. Still, I’d feel better with all my chicks under my wing.
From kazu-YO MOMMA? That's a bit of a stretch.
How any country expects to have a growing economy without a growing population is beyond me.
Your comment has no bearing on reality. With a massive deflation like is occurring there in no devaluation of the dollar going on here. Not only has the dollar been increasing versus the Euro but even the metals index has dropped way off of recent highs.
Given the drop in credit demands and tightening of debt requirements it is likely that monetary aggregates have fallen of late.
they are going to print up TARP2. no one will buy that debt.
I don’t see commodities spiking (except maybe gold/silver). Demand is plummeting for commodities across the board—if GDPs contract 15-30% like I think it will, we will continue to see demand fall off a cliff. At SOME POINT they will spike—but many years off. Unless of course the government does a Weimar.
Export manufacturing economies are dropping like a rock, and here we sit, a nation of debt-addled, maxxed out spendthrifts, with an economy that is at least 70% consumer spending, but with severely curtailed spending ... and yet we’re not in as bad a shape? At least, not yet?
It’s mindboggling.
Took me an annoyed hour or so to figure out what I'd done.
So who's left to buy the $9 trillion in treasury bills? Frankly, Im getting pretty nervous, especially with the ignorant poseur in Washington who has no clue and is clearly panicked.
Nothing is as secure as US debt and its price reflects that.
With interest rates as low as they are eventually the economies will restart. But the population has no patience.
It is ironic that after screaming about a horrible economy for eight yrs the RATS are about to get a taste of a real bad one. Lets watch the Treason media blame the next few years of dismal economy on Bush.
During the Depression we had negative real interest rates showing the impotency of monetary policy in moving the economy up. But few fiscal expenditures can be ramped up as fast as military ones. Will Obammy take that route?
This is a problem likely to be way beyond the crop of politicians in power. And watch what happens to tax revenues when the billions in capital losses start to wash through.
” Safer “ ? Relative term . Japan may be in recession , but they are not BANKRUPT like the USA . They can purchase all they need to weather the coming storm from somebody .
Also , I’d feel SAFER walking down a dark sidestreet in Tokyo than most smalltown streets in the USA .
>>>Get that man a BRO right away!
apparently he ain’t smokin’ just tobacco
Who is going to buy our debt?
Oil is at 39, so it won’t be the Arabs. Russia remains Russia. The entire EU is almost as bad off as we. And china, well I expect mass rioting followed by serious bloodshed.
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