Japan trade deficit grows as oil prices surge, yen drops

In the meantime as we pay more for oil Saudi Arabia is buying cheap Russian oil to power their facilities and selling their crude at premium prices.

As sanctions affect more and more outside of Russia, groups like the African Union is saying it's members are blaming the USA and Europe for rising prices because the Sanction have made it difficult for them to buy cheap grain and oil from Russia ( they are having difficulty paying because western banking blocking payments).

So Japan is paying more we are paying more and we are potentially creating an artificial famine in many poor countries.

Our leaders are geniuses! (That was sarcasm)

The sanctions are working well....... for Russia. In June Japan bought a little under 60% less coal from Russia. Over the same period, Japan paid 65.3% more for the coal it got from Russia.

If you look at all the world markets they are all struggling. The problem is each government printed money and managed a false economy and they are using the war in Ukraine as being the problem. I agree to some point but the biggest culprit is Covid it is designed to break the middle class and what you are seeing is the middle struggling and the upper getting richer. Take a look at China and their economy, look at the real estate and banking mess they are in. Greed was and is their biggest down fall they printed so much money and invested corrupt money they took from their citizen in other countries now the chickens is coming home to roost!

Typo "the franchise"

Kaimycahl, "if you look at all the world markets they are all struggling. The problem is each government printed money and managed a false economy and they are using the war in Ukraine as being the problem."

I don’t think the “biggest culprit is Covid” as you mentioned, it was the approaches that the government used to tackle the Covid and Ukraine problems. They simply did not learn from the past. China was different in the ways they approached the problems. As you should know, China did not print money but offer coupons for the people which boosted the economy and therefore, did not have big inflation problems like in the West including Japan. In the Western media, you would hear that the employment data were still good and you believed so. But isn’t that against the logic because during high inflation corporations’ bottom lines would be affected and that would lead to tightening of their finances by cutting staff. The West is now standing on the edge of a cliff. Without China’s help, recession here it comes. China did not add fuel to the fire in the Ukraine case by sanctioning and sending weapons to prolong the war which caused the energy crisis. Yes, China has real estate and banking problems but those are not critical to the point of collapsing its controlled economy like in the West caused financial crisis. You are right though that the rich are getting richer even after the downturn of the stock markets, note that only 4% of the rich control the US economy and they’ve sucked the life out of the middle class. I’ve always puzzled how the rich managed to get richer in time of crisis, maybe the crisis was created by them in the first place.

Oil prices have surged because the 46th killed the US oil industry. This is part of the controlled demolition of the world’s economy to usher in the liberal New World Order. We are living at the last hour of the last days.