Japan is still a buy

Japan is in recession for the fifth time in seven years, says Andrew Van Sickle. But things are not as bad as they seem.

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Japan is in recession for the fifth time in seven years. The economy shrank at an annual pace of 0.8% in the third quarter. There was a similar slide between April and June. That puts Japan in a technical recession. Yet "under the hood, the Japanese economic engine is sputtering less" than it seems, notes The Economist. Its potential growth rate is only a little above zero, because its working-age population is falling by around 1% a year, so it doesn't take much of a dip for growth to go negative.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.