Japanese Government Downgrades Economic Assessment

October 22, 2014 Share Print 0

The government on Tuesday downgraded its assessment of the Japanese economy for the second straight month in its monthly report for October, as the consumption tax hike in April continued to hit consumer spending and industrial production.

“The Japanese economy is on a moderate recovery, while weakness can be seen recently,” the Cabinet Office said in its report, in the latest sign that the 3-percentage-point consumption tax hike on April 1 to 8 percent will continue to have an adverse impact on the world’s third-largest economy.

It is the first time since 2012 that the government has downgraded its basic economic assessment for two months in a row.

The downgrading of the economic assessment comes at a time when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said he will decide by year-end whether to go ahead with a second consumption tax hike to 10 percent in October 2015 after assessing July-September gross domestic product data.

via Mainichi

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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.