32.6 Trillion Reasons for Japanese Consumers to Spend

(Bloomberg) -- Japanese households are sitting on an unusually large pile of savings that could fuel spending once uncertainty from the Covid crisis starts to abate. Excess savings -- the surplus in cash and deposits over the trend level -- shot up last year, as consumers pared expenditure and pocketed most of the emergency assistance doled out by the government: Bloomberg Economics estimates it hit 32.6 trillion yen (5.9% of GDP) in the final quarter of 2020, up from 0.8 trillion yen (0.2% of GDP) a year earlier.

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