Well, as Claus pointed out in his last post, Japanese data is pretty much a mixed bag at the moment. Industrial output shot up in April, and the May PMI data suggested that the easing of manufacturing contraction continued in May. However household spending and retail sales fell, unemployment rose, and the CPI reading suggested the Japanese economy is once more getting itself firmly wedged in inflation territory. So while the industrial data offers some much needed short term relief, the mid term outlook is still pretty bleak. Industrial Output Surges Well, as Bloomberg kindly pointed out, industrial output surged the most in 56 years in April. Production rose 5.2% from March, marking the second monthly gain, according to data from the Trade Ministry. The increase was faster than the 3.3 percent consensus forecast, and companies ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /There is no doubt about it: Italy's economic situation has worsened considerably during the current quarter. Only last week the OECD forecast that Italy's gross domestic product is likely to fall by 4.2 percent in 2009. This follows hot on the heals of an earlier statement where the OECD said the situation in Italy this year and next was "much worse" than it had previously thought, and that Italy would not come out of its recession until "sometime" in 2010 at the earliest. According to the earlier forecast the OECD expected GDP to fall this year by one percent and then by a further 0.8 percent in 2010.br /br /The Bank of Italy has also changed its forecast, and now suggest that GDP this year will fall by 2.6 percent. In January (the last time they revised their Italy forecast), the IMF forecast ...

strong/stronga href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SVFAWkhXc8I/AAAAAAAAL3k/ueQYKIgYSc0/s1600-h/hrvynia.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283074594387227586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 159px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SVFAWkhXc8I/AAAAAAAAL3k/ueQYKIgYSc0/s320/hrvynia.png" border="0" //abr /br /blockquotep“In Ukraine, the evidence is still that policymakers do not quite understand the seriousness of the challenges they face,”. Timothy Ash, analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland. /pp“There is a burgeoning economic crisis in the European periphery,” Krugman said on the ABC network Dec. 14. “The money has dried up. That’s the new center, the center of this crisis has moved from the U.S. housing market to the European periphery.” /p/blockquoteMake no mistake about it. What is taking place right now in Ukraine is extraordinarily serious. The IMF have recently agreed a support loan to the country, but the politicians themselves still can't agree on whether or not they are actually going to abide by the conditions attached to it. Meantime, as we can all see on ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Yesterday's comments by Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa that conditions in Japan's economy are severe and that monetary conditions are rapidly tightening should not be taken lightly in my opinion. Viewed alongside last weeks data revision which showed that Japan’s gross domestic product contracted much more rapidly in the third quarter than initially thought, and the recent admission by Japan’s Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa that employment conditions are also nowbecoming “severe.” it is clear that we are in the process of settling-in for what promises to be quite a long and hard recession.br /br /Revised data released last week showed that gross domestic product fell on quarter-by-quarter basis by 0.5 percent during the three months up to September, as compared with the preliminary estimate of only a 0.1 per cent decline. Year on year, the economy is now thought to have also contracted by ...