Japan's March 11 quake woke up the nation's 20 volcanoes, says meteorological agency

This is an essay about how the 3/11 quake in Japan is affecting Japan economy and by extension, the world's.

From International Business Times Hong Kong English edition today:

Japan warns of massive earthquake and volcanic explosion after the April 7 earthquake
"Japan's Meteorological Agency on Friday warned the country's 20 volcanoes has become alive due to the massive March 11 earthquake, and a study said earthquake over 9.0-magnitude might hit Japan. The number of earthquakes above 6.0 M reached 77 on March. And 74 out of them occurred in quake-hit region, were aftershock. The number is 50 times over the same period last year. The largest aftershock on April 7 hit Japan has killed 4 people, injured at least 166, and caused a power outage over 2.61 million households, according to Japan's police officials. The Meteorological Agency warned aftershocks above 6.0 M like the April 7 earthquake probably would hit Japan again. Meanwhile, quakes of the country's 20 volcanoes occurred more frequently after the massive March 11 earthquake, especially, the Fuji, Hakone, and Aso-San."

Millions of people are without power...radiation is poisoning their air, water, and food, there are continuing large aftershocks, and now they're warned of exploding volcanoes. I can't begin to comprehend the grief they must be feeling for their country, their families, and their own lives.

In economic news ... I mentioned before that the March 11 quake was a nation changing event but it was also a world changing event. Their economy may not recover, ever, and if it does, it will be years. Well, the economic impacts of that prediction are coming into sight now.

It's all about components.  From South Korea blog "Business Area"
"Japan’s disaster affecting the worldwide automotive industry, not least in South Korea. Some manufacturers in the Country of ginseng began to reassess its production because of fear of lack of supply components from Japan."

Toyota announced a shutdown of all North American plants (Canada/Mexico/US). GM Plants are on temporary slowdown. Toyota is shutting down UK manufacturing plants for an unknown period of time. Korea’s GM and Renault Samsung Motors Corporation (RSMC). Yena Cho, RSMC spokesman said the factory has begun to stop the activities of overtime on weekends, resulting in decreased production capacity of 2000-2500 units of this month (March 2011). There are lots more examples, but if you think about all those manufacturing plants not just in Japan & Korea, but in UK, and North America, that means no money is being exchanged over a commodity. Paychecks are not being given. It creates a huge hole. The auto industry especially, cannot get microchips, circuitry etc from Japan, and the interconnected complex global supply chain is beyond stressed.

Mike Ruppert: "Gross Domestic Product predictions for the world's economies (such as Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc) are made on the stance of positive growth. When large significant negative growth is shown across the board globally for a quarter, the markets have no place to go but implode." He explained that although fancy bookwork can be done in certain areas by changing definitions, moving columns here and there, the ONE thing that cannot be hidden (according to Ruppert) is GDP quarterly earnings reports. We have one more bit of this quarter's activity and the reports should be in by July that reflect the effect of the March-June quarter, which is the economic quarter of the Japanese quake and tsunami. "The markets still don't appreciate the Japanese earthquake" but it seems that the chickens will come home to roost by July's reports. And then watch out, said Ruppert.

Oil: fuel prices are spiking. How this affects the world's economy is in obvious and not so obvious ways. Not so obviously, is a story out of Nicaragua. "The [fishing] industry is “frozen” by high operative costs, even though international shrimp prices remain high." In the US, conventional production agriculture relies heavily on fossil fuels, particularly in its ability to provide high yields at low labor costs. However, the uncertain future of fossil fuel availability and prices means that in laymen's terms, farmers can't afford to put fuel in their tractors and fishermen can't afford to fuel u their boats.

This is the American Farm Bureau Report for first quarter of 2011, with AFBF’s Cyndie Sirekis and AFBF economist John Anderson interview.
Sirekis: Farm Bureau’s quarterly marketbasket survey tracks and reports on retail prices of 16 staple foods that can be used to prepare one or more meals at home.
John Anderson (AFBF economist): The total cost of these 16 items in our marketbasket for the first quarter 2011 worked out to forty-nine dollars and seven cents that was up about two dollars and 10 cents compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 so that’s about a 4 percent increase. Pretty much a continuation of a trend that we’ve seen for the last couple of quarters and pretty well in line with what we see in broader measures like the consumer price index.
Sirekis: Cheddar cheese, ground beef and vegetable oil were among the foods that increased the most in retail price. This rise in retail food prices was not unexpected, according to American Farm Bureau Federation Economist John Anderson. He says energy prices are a key driver behind retail food prices increases.
Anderson: Everything that you buy at the retail level is affected by energy prices. Energy prices affect the cost of processing, they affect the cost of packaging, they affect the cost of transporting and storing and operations at the retail level. Really, there’s not much in the marketing system that isn’t affected by the price of energy."

So the natural disasters affect manufacturing and manufacturing is affected by fuel prices and fuel prices affect farming and fishing and when farming and fishing is affected prices go up and when prices go up people who were put out of work by the slowdown and shutdown in manufacturing can't afford to buy food.

Ruppert warns that by July, the wheels will come off completely. He predicts the implosion of the economic markets as the quarterly reports come out will cause a 4000 or so point in the Dow as it suffers from loss of Japanese input. He said, "I do not think we will be living in anything like the society we have known by this fall. I'm as serious as I've ever been."

Is he being alarmist? He made a good case. It was obvious in March as the magnitude of the disaster on the world's third largest economy became evident and I wrote about it on March 16 here. Throughout the 1990s as the European Union came together and the euro was introduced as currency that the new world order of interconnectedness, of globalization was to be sought and extolled, might have been fine except that when one of the largest economies tanks, they all tank. I think that is where we are now. And by the looks of Japan's volcanoes waking up, the continual earthquakes, and the ongoing radiation problem, the issues of the loss of their economy will continue to be felt right straight through Revelation 18:10 when the entire economy collapses, for good.

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