Japan Is Back, yet Still Far From Its Old Days
Commentary
The sudden bull of the Japanese stock market in May called for a thorough review of Japan. Japan used to be excluded from Asia in the past decades, but concentrating on industrialization, its stock market expanded exponentially in the latter half of the 1980s. The recent Japanese stock index (whether Nikkei or Topix) is still below the 1990-year peak. Fair to say, it is not anything outstanding given after the depression, the U.S. stock index took only a quarter century to recover to its 1929 peak. Moreover, Japan’s latest quarterly real GDP YoY growth rate could barely evade consecutive quarters of negligible growth and contraction….