Japan’s inflation steepens, powered by hotels/lodging and food

10 comments

1. It’s behind a paywall

2. Paywalled but here’s the gist: Growth in consumer prices excluding fresh food inched up to 2.9% in October from 2.8% in September, staying above the BOJ’s 2% goal for a 19th month.

3. Kinda expected. Russian Ukraine conflict hitting food markets, weak yen increasing tourism.

4. I am very uninformed about all things related to economics, but I do live in Japan, so here is my extremely important opinion

   My life hasn’t changed much, probably fine

5. Japan been desperately seeking inflation for years.

   And now here it is.

   Not sure how anyone’s lives improved. Imports go up in price due to falling yen, yes that affects everyone in Japan too for example iphone is pricier now.

   Yes hotels are more expensive so travelling around is pricey. Crappy hotels like 50000 yen to 90000 yen in Tokyo. In meantime are people saving more money, or making more? Nope.

   Still the crappy 250,000 yen per month grad job work til 8pm

6. Seriously stable prices are the best. I don’t really understand why governments around the world keeps on aiming for inflation when unemployment is already so low

7. Someone tell the Japanese central bank that the money printer has served its purpose.

8. It’s obviously complex to analyze without having the data that our lovely government collect from companies and businesses

   But hotel and lodging cost up are to me related to greedy owners willing to recover from COVID period losses and milking the nice tourists coming over enjoying the FX rate benefits of a weak yen

   I am a foreigner living in Japan now but I can confess having done that in the mid 2000s traveling for holiday here when the rate was 170¥ to the Euro
   I enjoyed a lot spending during this trip and so are our current tourists I believe dragging hotel rooms prices up

   I dare I see that happening in business hotel I stay at when I travel to meet clients like in the last 2days
   Used to be possible to find below 10k¥ a night in Nagoya or Osaka but not that easy these days

   With food it is such a generic term that there are things to distinguish between for example import and locally proceeded food

   I am not super happy to have seen my favorite French wine and cheese steep price increase I can tell you

   But there are plenty of other similar examples with vegetables , meat , drinks and other dairy products being imported to Japan
   it’s obvious that it has an impact

   With locally processed food well it boils down also to inflation on energy costs and other inflationary impact

   I want to believe that wages in this sector of food processing being food companies or restaurants have actually already increased

9. Why does the Japanese government think increasing prices is going to *encourage* domestic spending? I mean…

10. Wow, at least they have modernized themselves enough to see where some of the money’s going, unlike the U.S.