This is getting hard to believe. The announcement that Japan has plunged into a triple dip recession should have been lights out for Abenomics. But, no, its madman prime minister has now called a snap election to enlist more public support for his campaign to destroy what remains of Japan’s economy.
And what’s worse, he’s not likely to be stopped by the electorate or even the leadership of Japan Inc, which presumably should know better. Here’s what Japan leading brokerage had to say about the “unexpected” 1.6% drop in Q3 GDP—- compared to the consensus expectation of a 2.2% gain and after the upward revised shrinkage of 7.3% in Q2.
We think that the economy is gradually improving,” said Tomo Kinoshita, an economist at Nomura Securities. “There’s no reason to be pessimistic about the economy going forward.”
Really? How in the world can an economist perched at the epicenter of Japan Inc. think that its economy is improving when Japan’s constant dollar GDP has now fallen back to pre-Abenomics levels; and, in fact, is no higher than it was in late 2007 prior to the “financial crisis”? Indeed, aside from the Q1 pull-forward of spending to beat the consumption tax increase, Japan’s economy has remained stranded on the flat-line it attained after world trade recovered from its 2008-2009 plunge.
But that’s only the most recent iteration of the stagnation story. Japan has actually been treading water for a long-time—going all the way back to July 1989 when the monumental bubble created by the BOJ during the 1980s was cresting.
Japan’s index of total industrial production during July of that peak bubble year printed at 96.8. So here’s the real shocker: It was still printing at 96.8 in July 2014. That’s right—- after 25 years of the greatest government debt and money printing spree in recorded history, Japan’s industrial production has gone exactly nowhere.
Given that baleful history and the self-evident failure of the Keynesian elixir to cure Japan’s economic stagnation problem, it might be asked why the entire country seemingly moves in lock-step toward bankruptcy behind the sheer foolishness of Abenomics. That’s especially the case because even the short-run impacts have been self-evidently damaging to the real economy and have been utterly inconsistent with promised results.
