For more than a decade, Japanese home builders have been tiptoeing into the U.S. housing market with small, discreet acquisitions of private American construction companies, the Wall Street Journal reported. Their quiet era is over. Japanese builders have announced or closed acquisitions of 23 U.S. single-family home builders since 2020, more than double the number from 2013 to 2019. That doesn’t include the multifamily developers and construction-supply companies they have also bought. By some estimates, Japanese builders are now set to own about 6% of the U.S. home-construction market.
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The workforce impact of Takeda’s recently announced reorganization has become clearer: The Japan-based pharma estimates the restructuring will affect around 634 U.S. employees, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice, BioSpace reported. Takeda began notifying employees on March 25, the same day it announced a business transformation, which includes streamlining corporate functions. However, the company noted in the WARN notice that the total number affected could change as staff pursue and accept redeployment opportunities across its global network.
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A key gauge of Japan's service-sector inflation rose 2.7% in February from a year earlier, data showed on Thursday, reinforcing the central bank's view that a tight labour market is pushing firms to pass rising costs on to consumers, Reuters reported. The Bank of Japan has stressed the need to see inflation durably hit its 2% target driven by rising wages and services prices, rather than higher raw material costs, to proceed with further interest rate hikes.
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Many Japanese banks in the countryside are struggling due to a shrinking population, but at a tiny credit union in the northernmost tip of the country, the situation is extreme, the Japan Times reported. Wakkanai Shinkin Bank serves customers in the city of the same name in northern Hokkaido. Once a bustling fishing hub, it has seen the number of residents roughly halve from its peak in 1964.
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Japan's core consumer inflation slowed below the central bank's 2% target in February for the first time in nearly four years, data showed, as government fuel subsidies offset rising import costs from a weak yen and surging oil prices from the Iran war, Reuters reported. While the reading is unlikely to upend the Bank of Japan's monetary tightening plan, the downward price pressure from government intervention will make the bank's communication more difficult as it seeks to raise still-low borrowing costs.
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The Bank of Japan held interest rates steady on Thursday but maintained its bias for tighter monetary policy, warning that surging oil prices driven by the Middle East conflict could exacerbate inflationary pressures, Reuters reported. Governor Kazuo Ueda said the BOJ board was somewhat more focused on upside risks to inflation than downside risks to growth from the conflict, keeping alive market expectations for a near-term rate hike. "Before the Middle East conflict, household and corporate activity had been firm.
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Japan will roll out subsidies for fuel products from Thursday to cap gasoline prices — which have risen to all-time highs following the escalating war in Iran — at around ¥170 ($1.10) per liter, the Japan Times reported. The national average retail price of gasoline rose to a record ¥190.8 per liter on Monday, up by ¥29 per liter from a week earlier, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy reported on Wednesday. The average price per liter for diesel and kerosene also rose to ¥178.4 and ¥154.1, respectively — both all-time highs as well.
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With the conflict in Iran rattling financial markets and oil prices, the Bank of Japan finds itself in a familiar dilemma, weighing a policy pause against the continued push for rate hikes, the Wall Street Journal reported. Escalating tensions in the Middle East have driven up crude prices, complicating the BOJ’s efforts to create stable 2% inflation backed by wage growth and demand, rather than higher costs.
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World leaders announced their most forceful response to the surge in oil prices since the war in Iran began at the end of last month, with Japanese and German officials saying they would release oil from their strategic reserves, the New York Times reported. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Japan would begin releasing oil as early as next Monday. Less than an hour later, Germany’s economy minister, Katherina Reiche, said her country would also release oil. Austria will also release oil from its reserves, the country’s economy minister, Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer, said.
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