Japan dominates news wires…  US retail sales to drop… Russia devalues the ruble again…  And Now… Today’s Pfennig! Most of the markets were closed yesterday, and trading was very light on Christmas eve. The Asian markets were open, and the dollar did sell off a bit vs. most of the major currencies with the one exception being the Japanese yen.

Unless we see a big bounce today, the yen will end the day with the first weekly loss vs. the US$ in two months. With a majority of markets closed, most news stories centered around the Japanese yen. Japanese industrial production fell the most in 55 years as reported on Wednesday. Factory output plunged 8.1% from October, more than 6.8% estimated by economists. Other data released in Japan showed the jobless rate climbed to 3.9% from 3.7%, and household spending slid .5%, a ninth drop.

Markets are now counting on the

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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 ...

Governments are hosing down the markets with bailout money. Central banks, meanwhile, are making sure the cost of borrowing is as close to zero as possible. We smell another bubble in the making…and another inevitable crash. Talk about priming the pump for the next bout of excessive exuberance.

– “The once unthinkable prospect of zero interest rates moved closer to reality yesterday,” says The Times. “Interest rates going to zero in our heroic struggle to become Japan,” says Henry Blodget on Clusterstock.

– Even Japan is racing to become the next Japan. Today, Japan announced it’s joining the global bailout bonanza. Prime minister Taro Aso says he will pump $275 billion of public funds into world’s second-largest economy. This will go toward expanded credits for

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It must now be horribly clear to everybody with an investment portfolio – indeed, to anyone who watches the financial markets – that no country or sector is safe from a bear market of the magnitude of the one we’re suffering through right now. When stocks get marked down en masse, as they have, literally everything drops. What’s more, there may be very little rationale for which stocks drop — or how much they drop by: When the wave of selling meets very few buyers, good stocks can easily fall more than bad ones. Does that mean it’s a waste of time to search for a “safe haven?” Absolutely not. Assuming you have the fortitude to avoid selling during the worst of this mess, the storm will eventually blow itself out. At that point, investors will look around at the wreckage, and start ...

68-year old Taro Aso is the new Prime Minister of Japan. Aso will make economic recovery his top priority and that should be very welcome news for investors. Talk is cheap so it remains to be seen how effective Aso will be at jump starting the Japanese economy. Japanese stocks are cheap so any economic improvement could be the start of very good times for investors.

I have been much more positive about the Japanese economy than most other analysts in recent months, largely because I believed that many of the problems from the Japanese recession of 1990-2003 were finally in the country’s rearview mirror. In particular, I believed that the Japanese budget deficit – which, by 2003, had become quite acute – was well on the way to being solved through public spending restraint. That, in turn, would allow Japan to pay down its excessive public debt, giving its private sector room to expand. But the surprise resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Monday suggests I may have been wrong about the country’s near-term prospects. Japan Gives Investors a Bubble Bath The Japanese stock market and real estate bubble of the 1980s is now the stuff of stock-market legend, for it sent that country into ...