I told you even before Fukushima that Japan is finished.
And again, this is the ‘Greatest Depression’ & the greatest financial/economic collapse in world history is coming.
– Whistleblower Woodford warns of Japan’s ‘collective economic suicide’ (Independent, Nov 23, 2012):
In the case of Japan these days, no news is ever good. The third-biggest economy in the world will next week release another set of numbers that will, in all likelihood, paint more detail of an economy laid up on the terminal ward.
In the third quarter of the year, Japan’s GDP crashed 0.9 per cent. In the West, we talk about Japan’s “lost decade” of zero growth and deflation, but in reality, they’ve lost two decades and are about to lose the third.
Meanwhile, its politics lurch from one crisis to the next. New parties are now uniting to kick out an old guard of politicians who have brought such listless drift to the country for so long.
But the new parties are of the right, sending worrying signals about how the general population is starting to think about getting itself out of the mire.
Recent days have seen shocking numbers from Panasonic and Sony, whose debt has been downgraded to junk status.
Sharp is like a walking zombie, warning earlier this month that it may not be able to survive, and the country’s “megabanks” have declared $6.7bn (£4.2bn) in losses on the value of their equity investments.
Meanwhile, the population is ageing faster than Dorian Gray’s portrait. The birth rate is so low that the country’s population shrinks each year, while the pensioners live ever longer. National debt as a proportion of GDP is running at 235 per cent – that’s even worse than Greece.
This is the compelling narrative of the country told by Michael Woodford, the whistleblower who won The Independent’s businessman of the year award last year for his brave exposure of a multibillion-dollar fraud at the heart of the Olympus cameras empire.
As the former chief told The Independent yesterday: “Japan is on an inevitable decline to oblivion.”
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