Any purchases financed by a pool of existing reserves will not have a weakening effect on the Japanese exchange rate.
The obesity rate among Japanese women remained below 5 percent, the rate among Italian women stayed below 10 percent, and the rates for women in the remaining countries were between 10 and 25 percent in 2003.
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As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.
From 2005 to 2009, it had the highest accident rate of any big Japanese nuclear plant, according to data collected by the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization, a mainly government-funded group.
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The Japan premium, the extra rate which all Japanese banks must pay to borrow in foreign currencies, has fallen only a bit.
As a callow bond-trader, fresh out of college, he participated in one of the greatest of them all, in Japan in 1986, when the yield on the ten-year benchmark Japanese government bond fell to 2.5%, the discount rate at the time.
"If GM, Ford and Chrysler were fully competitive with the Japanese in every other respect, the exchange rate would still put them at a crushing disadvantage, " says Laurie Harbour-Felax, author of a study that analyzes Detroit's competitiveness.
The crisis exposed or exacerbated ugly elements of Japanese society that had been swept under the tatami mat, from its high rate of suicides and domestic violence to bureaucratic bungling and dishonesty.
Put simply, the dollar-yen exchange rate has been artificially depressed because of a gigantic repatriation of Japanese investments from Europe and the U.S. The dollar will soon soar higher.
The Japanese economy grew at a 4.1% rate in the first quarter, Mexico was up 4.6%, and Singapore had an impressive growth rate of 10%, on the back of strong exports.
In another survey, which asked Japanese firms to rate which countries they regarded as the best places to invest in the next three years, the proportion opting for China dropped from 91% in 2004 to 77% last year, while the appeal of Vietnam and India rose substantially (see chart).
Among young Japanese, unemployment is nearly 10%, about twice the headline rate.
The Japanese bank has supposedly had, until very recently, a zero interest rate policy.
On the Japanese island of Okinawa, for example, people have a strikingly low rate of mental disorder and Okinawans are notable fish eaters, even by the standards of a piscivorous country like Japan.
After April, Mr. Takeuchi says the impact of a weaker currency will start to be felt, boosting Japanese earnings by around 15% based on the yen's current exchange rate against the dollar and the euro.
The divorce rate rose by half between 1990 and 1998, and more and more Japanese are choosing not to marry at all.
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That will not last for ever: if government debt continues to grow at its present rate, they may start to realise that Japanese government bonds are not the risk-free investments that they still consider them.
Of course, in a zero interest rate world where interest returns have dropped close to traditionally low Japanese levels in the U.S. and elsewhere, Japan at present does not have much of a competitive disadvantage.
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With major automakers announcing their Chinese sales for November, deliveries of Japanese automakers such as Toyota Motors and Honda Motors were down as expected, but the rate of decline was less than what many had predicted.
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In 1998, Japanese households increased the share of their (declining) incomes that they put into savings from an average rate of 12% in 1990-96 to 15-16%.
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The yen has lost about 20% of its value against the US dollar since October, helping Japanese firms to convert overseas profits back into yen at a more favourable rate.
The Japanese consumer isn't as over-leveraged as their U.S. counterparts, and their savings rate is higher.
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