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Global credit crisis drives up corporate failures in Japan

Japan’s corporate bankruptcies rose 13.4 percent last month as the fallout from the global credit- market turmoil engulfed the world’s second-largest economy.

Business failures climbed to 1,429 cases last month from the same month a year earlier, Tokyo Shoko Research Ltd said in a report in Tokyo yesterday. The rate of increase eased from September’s 34 percent, which was the steepest in eight years.

Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said last month that increasing bankruptcies in the property industry were making it costlier for some companies to borrow, further stifling economic growth.

The bank lowered its benchmark interest rate to 0.3 percent from 0.5 percent last month, the first cut in seven years, to stave off a prolonged recession.

“We expect Japan’s economy to barely expand” both in the year ending March 31 and the next, said Junko Nishioka, an economist at RBS Securities Japan Ltd in Tokyo. “Growth will remain pretty weak for the time being.”

Developers in Japan are among the hardest hit by the financial turmoil as foreign investors withdraw from the market, banks cut lending and the slowing economy dampens demand for homes. Six of seven listed companies that went out of business last month were real estate-related firms, and fallout from the industry’s slump is spreading to the overall economy.

GDP probably expanded at an annual 0.1 percent pace in the three months ended Sept. 30 after contracting 3 percent in the second quarter, the median estimate of 26 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News showed.
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