Japan

Officials from Hong Kong's flagship Cathay Pacific airline confirmed that the crew of a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong reported seeing North Korea's recent test of its most powerful ICBM conducted last Wednesday, according to the South China Morning Post. According to flight trackers, flight CX893 was over Japan when the missile was launched on November 29 at approximately 2:18 a.m. Hong Kong time. A spokeswoman from the airline said that the crew made a report of the suspected re-entry of the North Korean missile after the incident.

Authord by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist,

I am aware of all the doomsday Yen hyper-inflationary predictions due to their soaring debt-to-GDP ratio. And these Japanese bears very well might prove correct… In the long run.

Earlier we joked that today's rally was losing steam, and it "needs a North Korean ICBM launch to find new strength."

This rally needs a North Korean ICBM launch to find new strength

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 4, 2017

There was something different about today's ballistic missile test: according to a preliminary analysis from the Pentagon, the rocket was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which was reported to have flown for 50 minutes, on a very high trajectory reaching 4,500 km above the earth (more than ten times higher than the orbit of Nasa’s International Space Station) before coming down nearly 1,000 km from the launch site off the west coast of Japan.

Corporate Japan's credibility, already teetering after a barrage of corporate fraud and falsification scandals in recent months, hit another low after Toray Industries, one of Japan's biggest materials manufacturers, joined a list of companies admitting to falsifying data. On Tuesdaty, Toray announced it had uncovered 149 cases of data fabrication at its subsidiary, Toray Hybrid Cord, in three products sold to tire companies and autoparts makers: tire cords, cords for car hose belts and cords for paper making.