Japan Retail Sales Fall 9.7% in March

Japan’s retail sales for March plunged 9.7 percent on-year, well below expectations, after last year’s sales were front-loaded as shoppers splurged ahead of a sales-tax increase.

Retail sales were expected to fall 7.3 percent, according to a Reuters poll of 17 analysts. The decline follows February’s 1.8 percent drop.

“If you look at the larger data points of the past three to six months, they’ve been pretty bad all around,” Joe Zidle, a portfolio strategist at Richard Bernstein Advisors, told CNBC. “If you think about the consumer’s importance … it’s 60 percent of the Japanese economy, I think this ratchets up the pressure on the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in order to introduce more stimulus.”

via CNBC

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza