Question of the Day

Should NFL players be fired for 'taking a knee' during anthem?

Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy, will likely report on Monday that its fourth-quarter output plunged at an annual rate of nearly 12 percent, according to a survey of economic forecasters.

As world demand for imported goods collapses, the export-dependent economy of Japan has been hammered. The survey forecast that Japan’s gross domestic product plummeted 11.7 percent during the October-December period. That would be three times steeper than the decline experienced in the United States during the fourth quarter.

Japan probably suffered its worst quarter since the oil shock of 1974, when Arab OPEC members slashed output in response to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, according to the consensus of market forecasts. The October-December period will mark theJapanese manufacturers cut output 9.6 percent in December, compared with November. It was the largest monthly drop since the government began compiling the data in 1953. Manufacturing production was expected to fall a further 9.1 percent in January, the government said.

Household spending dropped nearly 5 percent in December, marking the 10th consecutive month of decline. Not surprisingly, business investment is falling as well.

“The fallout from the worldwide recession has rippled through the Japanese job market,” Economy Minister Kaoru Yosano said late last month.

One after another, premier Japanese companies have been announcing massive job cuts.

NEC, the global electronics giant, will lay off 20,000 workers, half of them in Japan, where the unemployment rate jumped from 3.8 percent in November to 4.4 percent in December. It was the biggest monthly