The 29-Year Wage High Rests on One Line the Ministry Itself Calls a Distortion
Japan's September labour cash earnings rose 4.6% year on year, the fastest since January 1997, and real wages accelerated from 1.6 to 2.2% against a 1.3% consensus — a ninth straight positive month.
Read the rest of the release. The headline got there because special payments rose 32.6% after 1.8% in August, and the labour ministry itself attributed that to a statistical distortion rather than to bonuses being paid; two independent readers carry the disavowal, one calling it a distortion and the other an anomaly. Meanwhile every pay measure a household actually receives each month slowed: base pay 3.8 to 3.7, regularly paid 3.9 to 3.6, overtime 4.9 to 3.6 on three readers, real regularly paid earnings halved from 1.6 to 1.1. Part-time hourly pay "accelerated" to 5.4% while the same-sample row stayed flat at 4.7 — that is a change in who is counted. We also nearly published a false correction: we had carried "4.6 versus 3.8 expected", found 3.8 in a table as August's base pay, drafted the correction, then second-sourced it and found 3.8 was the consensus after all. 3.8 appears twice in one release meaning two different things. Monday closed New York around 157.91, down 54.7 to 62.0 pips on four published Friday closes and 69 to 78 pips under a 200-day that seven readings place across nine pips, with December WTI at $86.85 the named cause. The Summary of Opinions lands at 23:50 UTC and we pre-register what it should contain.