Jun 13, 2012

Signs of a slowdown in China

The People’s Bank of China on June 7 lowered banks’ one-year lending rate by a quarter percentage point to 6.31 percent and one-year deposit rate by the same margin to 3.25 percent — the first full-scale monetary easing by China since a similar move ...

May 23, 2012

Economic uncertainties ahead

The Cabinet Office’s preliminary report on May 17 stated that Japan’s gross domestic product in the January-March period increased by 1 percent from the previous quarter in real terms or an annualized 4.1 percent. This performance, better than expected by private-sector analysts, is mainly ...

Mar 31, 2012

Approach tax hike with caution

The Noda Cabinet on Friday endorsed and submitted to the Diet a bill aimed at raising the consumption tax from the current 5 percent to 8 percent from April in 2014 and to 10 percent from October 2015. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda is so ...

Mar 14, 2012

Japan's cautionary tale for the U.S.

by Robert J. Samuelson

Since the financial crisis, a shadow has hovered over the U.S. economy: Japan. Could what happened there happen to us? The bursting of Japan’s real estate and stock bubble in the early 1990s has had lasting consequences: a “lost decade” (actually, two) of meager ...

Mar 14, 2012

A wakeup call Japan ignored

by Paul Blustein

At 2:46 p.m. Sunday, March 11, my family and I joined millions of Japanese standing silently at a Buddhist temple or a Shinto shrine. With heads bowed, we remembered the events of one year earlier, when our house swayed for nearly three minutes and ...

Mar 7, 2012

Third term for Mr. Putin

He did it again. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won another presidential election. While the outcome was no surprise, neither was the controversy that greeted his victory. Despite Mr. Putin’s claim that he won “an open and honest fight,” the opposition has charged that ...

Jan 12, 2012

A way out of the debt crisis

Loss of confidence in the financial conditions of eurozone countries with mounting debts has destabilized financial markets, and the uncertainty now threatens to put the global economy in jeopardy. Amid the crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France met ...

Jan 9, 2012

Variable economic winds

As the Japanese economy greets the new year, overcoming the long period of deflation that has suffocated consumer spending and corporate investment should be the main goal of the government and the private sector. Firms can expect tailwinds from a rise in demand due ...

Dec 6, 2010

Deceptive GDP performance

Japan’s gross domestic product increased 0.9 percent in real terms in the July-September quarter from the April-June quarter for an annualized 3.9 percent growth rate. The 0.9 percent increase contrasts with the 0.4 percent rise registered in the previous quarter. Domestic demand pushed up ...