It is time for another chapter of our Discovering Japan ( h/t Graham Parker and the Rumour) series and let us open by dipping into Japanese culture.
As spring approaches, the country’s weather forecasters face one of their biggest missions of the year: predicting exactly when the famed cherry blossoms will bloom.
The nation’s sakura (cherry blossom) season is feverishly anticipated by locals and visitors alike. Many tourists plan their entire trips around the blooms, and Japanese flock to parks in droves to enjoy the seasonal spectacle. ( Japan Times).
This is something which can be shared to some extent by users of Battersea Park as the Japanese Embassy financed an avenue of cherry blossom trees there in a nice touch of what is called cherry blossom diplomacy.
If we switch to financial news that will be considered good by the Bank of Japan, then we can see three factors at the moment. We can start with the equity market where the Nikkei 225 index has risen 126 points to 21,431 this morning. This means that the dip of the end of December is now only a bad dream for it as we recall that central banks love higher equity markets especially when in this case they have been buying it. Japan is a country that literally has a Plunge Protection Team as what has become called the Tokyo Whale makes equity purchases on down days.
If we switch to the currency then the Bank of Japan will be a lot happier than it was in mid-January. At that point markets had what we might call a yen for Yen and in a “flash rally” it went below 105 versus the US Dollar which rather suspiciously broke more than a few Japanese exporters currency hedges and to 132.5 versus the UK Pound £. As a central bank with an objective to weaken the yen under the Abenomics strategy this will have upset the Bank of Japan and it will be much happier with the 110.87 to the US Dollar as I type this. It would of course prefer an exchange rate over 120 as it managed for a while but with a summit due with President Trump that can be overlooked for now.
Next we can look at what is a strong candidate for the most rigged market on earth which is the Japanese Government Bond market. So far the Bank of Japan has purchased some 473,087,792.358,000 Yen’s worth of Japanese government securities in as near to monetary financing as a first world country has actually got. Whilst the pure definition of the treasury issuing debt to the central bank does not take place over time it starts to rather look like that in effect. Here is the current description.
yield curve control, in which the Bank seeks a decline in real interest rates by controlling short-term and long-term interest rates, has been placed at the core of the new policy framework.
This means that Japan can borrow effectively for nothing as its ten-year yield is -0.04% as I type this and therefore a lot of its debt is adding to the world total of negative yielding debt. Not all of it as the thirty-year yield is 0.58% but even that is very low and means that should it so choose Japan can borrow incredibly cheaply.
So Governor Kuroda can sleep soundly at night on these three grounds.
The economy
This is much less satisfactory as it shrank in the second half of last year as quarterly growth of 0.3% followed -0.7%. This meant that at the end of 2018 the annual rate of growth was zero or as their official statisticians put it. -0.0%. This is quite a slowing on the 2.4% recorded at the end of 2017 but if we take a broad sweep we see that all this monetary action of negative interest-rates and QQE doesn’t seem to be doing that much good. This theme will hardly be helped by this morning’s news.
The nation’s trade deficit for January grew from a year earlier with exports to China tumbling in their worst decline in three years, government data showed Wednesday.
Japan logged a trade deficit for the month of ¥1.41 trillion ($12.8 billion), 49.2 percent larger than a year before, the Finance Ministry said. ( Japan Times)
The January data is generally a weaker month due to the timing of the Chinese New Year but as you can see there has been a sharper impact this year as we get another perspective on the Chinese economic slow down.
But last month, “exports of products such as microchip-making devices that are not related to China’s New Year celebration fell, showing that Chinese companies’ spending on equipment and plants is falling,” Minami said.
Overall Japanese exports in January were 8.4% lower in January than in 2018 and this will be a further deduction from an already weak economic outlook. This adds to this from Reuters.
Data released on Monday showed core machinery orders, considered a leading indicator of capital expenditure, fell 0.1 percent month-on-month in December……
Highlighting bigger concerns about the external environment, however, was a 21.9 percent month-on-month slump in orders from overseas, the biggest fall since November 2007.
This had previously been a strong series but whilst domestic demand has continued foreign demand has not.
Demographics
We have looked at the consequences of an ageing and indeed shrinking population many times and here is a new perspective from the World Economic Foundation.
In 2018, there were 921,000 births and 1.37 million deaths, meaning Japan’s population fell by 448.000 people. That was its largest ever annual natural population decline.
The number of male workers in 2040 will fall by 7.11 million from 2017, while the number of working women will decrease by 5.75 million.
Or to add it all up.
As many as 12 million Japanese people may disappear from the country’s workforce by 2040, according to official estimates. That’s a fall of around 20%.
Comment
Let me open by advancing my theme that it would be better if Japan simply accepted reality rather than undertaking what are King Canute style actions. On this road it would accept that a shrinking and ageing population will have periods of economic decline in GDP terms. In many ways Japan deals with its ageing population better than we do and it could also be a leader in terms of a shrinking one. This could be a route forwards for our planet too as fewer humans would place less of a strain on Japan’s limited natural resources. Also it does have a very large national debt but it is mostly domestically owned and would benefit from a national debate of how to deal with it rather than snake-oil efforts. Instead we get ever more financial action pushing for growth accompanied by threats and sanctions based on a green response to the growth.
Meanwhile the chorus is tuning up for “more,more,more” as this illustrates.
“If (currency moves) are having an impact on the economy and prices, and if we consider it necessary to achieve our price target, we’ll consider easing policy,” ( Governor Kuroda yesterday according to Reuters).
Mind you even past supporters of the extraordinary monetary policies are giving up or rather switching to fiscal policy.
Japan must ramp up fiscal spending with debt bank-rolled by the central bank, the Bank of Japan’s former deputy governor Kikuo Iwata said, a controversial proposal that highlights the BOJ’s challenge as it tries to reignite an economy after years of sub-par growth. ( Reuters)
It is not that he would not like to expand monetary policy more but he is unable to look beyond his “precious”
He said there are few tools left to ease monetary policy further as cutting already ultra-low interest rates could push some financial institutions into bankruptcy.
Where these people never get challenged is that they promise success each time but in a burst of collective amnesia their past failures seem to give them credibility rather than demotion. I guess that is what happens when you do what the establishment wants….
Also the financial media that pushed the story of last autumn that the Bank of Japan was reducing equity purchases should be red faced now. For the rest of us we need to be thinking if the Vapors were prescient all those years ago.
I’m turning Japanese
I think I’m turning Japanese
I really think so
Turning Japanese
I think I’m turning Japanese
I really think so