>The Panic Spreads
>Benjamin Fulford, Forbes Global, 02.18.02
>
>You can no longer safely shrug off Japan's economic crisis. It just might
>drag the world into a depression.
>The world--including even the previously sanguine Japanese--is now catching
>on to the fact that Japan's 12-year slump has deteriorated into a full-blown
>crisis, threatening a wild global ride. Falloffs in various indicators in
>the world's second-largest economy resemble the plunge of such countries as
>the U.S. into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Japan has a problem, but really, this is just a tad overblown. Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. real GDP fell by 27%, employment fell by 24%, and the unemployment rate rose from 3% to 25%. Japan had (weakly) positive GDP growth from mid-1999 to mid-2001, and it fell at a 2% annual rate in 01Q3. Unemployment is a bit over 5%, up from the mid-3% range in 1998. Japan's in a recession within a longer stagnation, but hold the 1930s precedents until they're really needed.
Doug