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Japan's Consumer Prices Fall a Third Month; Jobless Rate at 4.3%
Japan’s consumer prices fell for a third month in July, underscoring concern that the central bank is too optimistic about the outlook for achieving its 1 percent inflation goal. Consumer prices excluding fresh food dropped 0.3 percent from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said in Tokyo today. That matched the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The jobless rate stayed at 4.3 percent, a government report showed. Today’s data may reinforce doubts over the central bank’s efforts to reverse more than a decade of deflation as the European debt crisis hurts Japan’s economy by dragging ... (full story)