Japan

Just over 5 years since the massively destructive 2011 Japanese earthquake which unleashed a tsunami and led to the Fukushima disaster, moments ago NHK reported that Japan's Kumamoto region had been hit with another quake which had a Shindo shaking intensity of 7 and registered a magnitude of apprxoimately 6.4.

According to the Japanese media this is the strongest quake to hit Japan since the 2011 earthquake. The good news is that so far there has been no tsunami alert.

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

After three decades of epic deficit spending and three years of extraordinary money creation, Japan’s economy is enjoying a rollicking inflationary boom. Just kidding. Exactly the opposite is happening:

Japan households’ inflation expectations hit three-year low – BOJ

 

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

As I’ve outlined in recent missives, Japan is at the forefront for Keynesian driven Central Bank monetary policy. Japan was not only the first Central Bank to start ZIRP and QE, it has also launched the single largest QE program in history (a single QE program equal to over 25% of Japan’s GDP).

However, in the last few months, the Head of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda has lost credibility for the markets. Specifically:

1)   The markets only rallied for a day after he announced NIRP.

Back in October 2014, just after the BOJ drastically expanded its QE operation, we warned that the biggest risk facing the BOJ (and the ECB, and the Fed, and all other central banks actively soaking up securities from the open market) was a lack of monetizable supply. We cited Takuji Okubo, chief economist at Japan Macro Advisors in Tokyo, who said that at the scale of its current debt monetization, the BOJ could end up owning half of the JGB market by as early as in 2018.