{"id":521241,"date":"2026-04-09T10:31:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T10:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521241\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T10:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T10:31:13","slug":"japan-consumer-sentiment-plunges-in-march-as-us-iran-conflict-weighs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521241\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan consumer sentiment plunges in March as US-Iran conflict weighs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">The main consumer confidence index takes a dive from 39.7 in February to 33.3 in March. And that is the weakest reading since the middle of last year. The US-Iran conflict is threatening to derail the consumer recovery in Japan, not least with higher petrol prices and spillovers to higher inflation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">And for the BOJ, it isn&#8217;t the good kind of inflation. All of this is part of cost-push inflation, which is what the central bank specifically wants to avoid. For policymakers, it is vital that price pressures are driven up by stronger wages instead.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">Circling back to the report, you can see how serious the impact of the war in the Middle East is weighing on sentiment:<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">Looking at the breakdown of the individual components:<\/p>\n<p>Overall livelihood: 29.7 (previously 39.5)Income growth: 39.8 (previously 42.3)Employment: 37.6 (previously 46.3)Willingness to buy durable goods: 26.0 (previously 33.7)<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">It&#8217;s a fall across the board as the mood darkens for Japanese consumers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">Meanwhile, price expectations also saw a significant increase after having fallen in recent months. The percentage of households expecting prices to &#8220;go up&#8221; shot back up to 93.1% in March. That is up from 85.6% in February before this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The main consumer confidence index takes a dive from 39.7 in February to 33.3 in March. And that&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-521241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}