The headline says “Japan nears fifth recession in 15 years”.  That’s quite an economic record for a former powerhouse.

The most infuriating part of the commentary, though, is this statement from an “economist”,
 “The question is how long and deep this downturn will be and how policy makers will react,” said Masamichi Adachi, an economist at JPMorgan.
It’s abundantly clear what Mr. Adachi is indicating: how much more “stimulus” from the Bank of Japan can we expect in the future.  For the record, the BoJ just embarked on its ninth (or tenth, depending on how you separate iterations) episode of QE.  If Mr. Adachi was instead indicating that perhaps the BoJ might finally see some correlation between nine instances of QE and five instances of recession all compressed within a short fifteen year period of economic stagnation and dysfunction, we could finally become optimistic that just maybe the powers that be in the monetary world have finally seen the light, and seen it empirically in their own math-obsessed methods.  But, alas, central banks only go in one direction, and so does their respective economies.  At least we can all learn from Japan’s experience and avoid their fate, right?