In case you hadn’t heard about Japan’s horrific third quarter GDP numbers, the chart below via this BBC report should aid in understanding why the financial world is again baffled by the failure of central bank largess to impact the real economy in the desired fashion.
Analysts were expecting a growth rate of +2 percent and what they got was -2 percent, surprisingly fitting the widely accepted definition of a recession (two consecutive quarters of contraction). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in Japan.
