Russia is not the only one. Japan now is on the verge of collapse as well.
A reader chided me for not making note of the truly dreadful factory output figures released last Thursday, which showed a fall of 9.6%.
I have to confess that I have fallen into “Japan bad news” syndrome, in that I expect bad news out of Japan and therefore did not focus enough on the details. And while I do not aspire to covering every financial news story (that’s what the MSM is for), the latest figures paint a grim picture, even by our new, desensitized standards.
It wasn’t simply that December was truly awful, but it came on top of a nearly-as-bad November
via naked capitalism: Veneroso: Japan on the Edge of the Abyss.
Again, this is what happens when you inflate a money supply and create a bubble.
Yves continues:
Yves here. I only get the privilege of reading Veneroso now and again, but I cannot recall him taking a tone remotely like what follows:
I have been writing about an Asian black hole for almost two months now. I have been crying from the rooftops about an emerging depression in Japan. It has been as though a neutron bomb had gone off in the world. There was no one who seemed to notice, no one who seemed to listen.Every week it gets worse and worse and worse. Today it was Japan….
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN DATA THIS BAD FOR ANY MAJOR ECONOMY – EVEN IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION. December industrial production came in down 9.6%, worse than the METI forecast. It is now down almost 21% year over year. METI forecasts a further 4.7% decline in February. The inventory to production ratio soared again. Maybe METI will be correct.
If it is, Japan industrial production will have fallen 28% (non annualized) in four months. It will have fallen by a third in about a year. Nothing in the history of major nations compares. A 28% decline in four months would be more than half of the entire decline in U.S. industrial production over the 3 years and nine months of the U.S. Great Depression.
It would be a greater decline in four months than in any 12 month period in the Great Depression in the U.S. We are literally looking at the unimaginable. (I am attaching the U.S. industrial production index from the Great Depression for comparison).
IT’S A DEPRESSION IN JAPAN – ALREADY – PURE AND SIMPLE.
If this is true, unless President Obama can pull some sort of a miracle out of his rather skinny ass. We are in deep trouble. The reason I say this is because we are in a Globalist Economy, whether we like it or not, and Japan’s failures are our failures as well.
I think it will get much worse, before it gets any better. 🙁
(Via Freedom’s Phoenix)