Japan averts a technical recession - Scotiabank

Analysts at Scotiabank noted that Japan’s economy averted a technical recession by one mechanical definition marked by back-to-back quarterly contractions in economic output.

USD/JPY: advances likely in the near-term - FXStreet

Key Quotes:

"GDP grew by 1.7% q/q at a seasonally adjusted and annualized pace in the first quarter of 2016.

That not only far exceeded consensus expectations for 0.3% growth (and every estimate within), it was also the ‘strongest’ growth since the first quarter of last year (5.4%) but only by a smidge over the 1.6% pace registered in Q3 of last year.

Some tended to dismiss part of the result as due to a leap year effect, which strikes us as odd since presumably consensus knew going into the estimate that February had an extra day in it and the magnitude of the beat is far beyond one calendar day’s worth of activity.

Consumer spending did the heavy lifting by rising at a non-annualized 0.5% clip or 1.9% annualized (versus 0.2% non-annualized expected) and contributing 0.3 percentage points to the 0.4% rise in GDP.

And that’s it for the good news. Housing investment contracted for the second straight quarter and business capital investment shrank by 1.4% which reverses all of the gain in Q4 and then some. Government spending grew by 2.6% q/q annualized but only added 0.2% to GDP growth. Inventories were a neutral effect."