Tag Archives: Shinzo Abe

After the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Tokyo with tales seemingly spun from some sci-fi disaster movie, all eyes turned to Japan. Cruisers had boarded the vacation vessel in Yokohama on January 20 already knowing that there was something bad going on in China’s Wuhan. The big ship would head out anyway for a fourteen-day tour of Vietnam, Taiwan, and, yes, China. Three days in, news reached the Diamond that the Communists had closed down the affected region....

What’s next for Japanese corporate earnings? Well, that depends. Consider the April-to-June Japanese earnings season, which can be considered a pleasant surprise or a bleak portend based on which numbers you choose to accentuate. Where you stand on Japan depends on where you sit.   The quarter was a winner in terms of performance relative to past expectations. Japanese companies beat consensus estimates for both operating and net profits by 11 percent, and twice as many companies beat...

  Quarterly meeting of the Incrementum Fund The quarterly meeting of the Incrementum Fund’s advisory board was held on July 19. A pdf transcript of the discussion can be downloaded via the link below. We were once again joined by special guest Brent Johnson, the CEO of Santiago Capital. When Will the Helicopter Take Off? This time the debate revolved around the threat of “helicopter money”, which has become a lot...

Japanese central bankers are not in an enviable position. The year-over-year growth rate of the country’s core consumer price index was -0.4 percent in May, marking the third consecutive monthly decline—and this after three years of Abenomics.   Brexit certainly hasn’t helped. The yen has strengthened from ¥121 to the dollar in February 2016 to ¥105 in late July. That’s had the effect of reducing import prices, but it has also put downward pressure on inflation. Japan economists on...

Chopper Pilot Descends on Nippon Readers are probably aware of recent events in Japan, the global laboratory for interventionist experiments. The theories of assorted fiscal and monetary cranks have been implemented in spades for more than a quarter of a century in the country, to appropriately catastrophic effect. Amid stubbornly stagnating economic output, Japan has amassed a debt pile so vast since the bursting of...

Over the past four days, risk assets have been on a tear, led by the collapsing Yen and soaring Nikkei, as the market has digested daily news that – as we predicted last week – Bernanke has been urging Japan to become the first developed country to unleash the monetary helicopter, in which the central banks directly funds government fiscal spending, most recently with an overnight report that Bernanke has pushed...

With global attention focused on BREXIT calamity, potentially more important questions are being overlooked, and especially in the South China Sea where storms are currently brewing between China and a range of littoral states for strategic control of territorial waters. To be clear, our long term geostrategic position remains unchanged; China moving towards the ‘nine dash’ line China will gradually secure control of...

Shinzo Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda, professional yen assassins Photo credit: Toru Hanai / Reuters Policy-Induced Contrition in Japan As we keep saying, there really is no point in trying to make people richer by making them poorer – which is what Shinzo Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda have been trying to do for the past several years. Not surprisingly, they have so to speak only succeeded in achieving the second part of the equation: they have certainly managed to impoverish their fellow Japanese...