Macro and Markets Dashboard: Japan (February 20, 2016 — PDF)
Macro and Markets Dashboard: United States (February 20, 2016 — PDF)
Given a relatively calm week for markets, I’m going to make a more procedural update this week and share two developments with my tools. First, I’m including a draft dashboard for Japan. Second, I’ll be sprinkling in some bar chart plots, which I hope dig a bit deeper into some interesting time series.
The draft dashboard for Japan still needs a lot of work, but provides a few interesting indicators of macro and market conditions in the land of the rising sun. For example, Japanese government bonds (JGBs) were in the news when the BOJ negative interest rate policy pushed yields on ten year bonds negative. While the shorter-duration bond yields are still negative, ten year yields are now virtually flat (see below). 
Additionally, I’ve developed some bar plots for looking deeper into changes to prices. Below, I include the decomposition of the Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index into selected categories. I’ve used the 12-month percentage change to individual CPI and PPI series in this example. Hopefully, I can integrate these charts into the main dashboard, over the coming weeks. We can see from this example, that health care costs continue to rise more rapidly than other costs, and that the fall in energy prices slowed during January.
BD Economics 