Chart of the Week: Industrial Production in Japan

With all the hoopla over a 3.8% drop in Q4 GDP in the United States and a 2.0% decline in industrial production reported two weeks ago, this seems like a good time to remind my largely Amerocentric audience that things are much worse overseas, particularly in Asia.

During the week Japan reported that December industrial production fell 9.6% and South Korea reported a December decline of 18.6%. These are staggering numbers, whether one chooses to compare them to U.S. data or to historical data sets.

In this week’s chart of the week, I have elected to compare Japanese industrial production data from December 2003 to December 2008 (click to enlarge), partly because I like the look of the Japanese characters and partly because it illustrates just how dramatically Japan’s export economy declined during the last three months of 2008.

Rapidly declining industrial production may well be Asia’s next major export to the U.S.

Comments

[Tom Armistead:]

Bill, there is nothing remarkable about that chart pattern, i have seen it hundreds of times, I must own 30 stocks that have the same pattern - it goes up gradually for quite a while, then it falls off a cliff.

Sometime you get a wierd mirror image, like for CDS spreads, it goes down gradually for quite a while, then it sails up into the stratosphere.

Feb 01 01:30 PM

[driftwood2:]

Eastern europe has suffered horrible production declines as well.

Feb 01 03:45 PM

[Conan the B...:]

A double digit drop in GDP will give you that kind of pattern.

This is what some Japanese economists have started forecasting.

Feb 02 09:21 AM