There were indications today that Japan's slide into recession is steepening.
The Bank of Japan (BoJ) released a depressing view of the economy, and data showed its trade surplus had slumped even before last week's terrorist attacks.
Adding to the grim picture, figures on fund flows in and out of Japan showed foreign investors dumped a net 269 billion yen ($2.29 billion) in Japanese stocks last week in a flurry of nervous repatriation as the US prepares for war.
The BOJ, fresh from its latest monetary easing, downgraded its economic assessment for the fourth straight month in a report that failed to locate a single bright spot in the economy.
In a worrying sign for Japan's swelling ranks of unemployed, it said the downturn was spreading to employment and incomes and cited deep uncertainty in the global economy following the devastating airplane assault on New York and Washington.
That assessment followed government data showing Japan's customs-cleared trade surplus dropped 47.2 per cent in August from a year earlier. That underscored the pressure that slowing global growth was already putting on the export-oriented economy.
The once-mighty trade surplus fell to 320.25 billion yen in August from 606.28 billion yen a year earlier as a drop in exports exceeded that in imports.
Japan's economy has been suffering from a decade of stop-go growth, and many analysts believe it will slip into a second consecutive quarter of decline in the July-September quarter, meeting the common definition of recession.
