Japan's consumer confidence dropped to its lowest level in more than four years in December as a combination of falling wages and rising prices continued to squeeze households. The sentiment index slid to 38 last month from 39.8 in November,
the Cabinet Office said today in Tokyo. There isn't that much more to say about this at the present time, since it is unfortunately now all too predicatble. Confidence among consumers hasn't been this low since June 2003, when unemployment was close to a postwar high, so the novelty here is the unemployment is pretty low, but still people are being squeezed. This merits a lot more thought beiong given to the why and the wherefore.
All the components in the index are down, and at the same time we also learned to day
from Monthly Labour Survey conducted by the Japanese labour ministry that wages nonly showed an annual gain of 0.1 percent in November and this was only the second monthly increase in the 11 months of 2007 for which we now have data.
