{"id":429387,"date":"2026-04-09T12:40:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T05:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/2026\/04\/japan-consumer-sentiment-plunges-in-march-as-us-iran-conflict-weighs\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T12:40:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T05:40:21","slug":"japan-consumer-sentiment-plunges-in-march-as-us-iran-conflict-weighs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/japan-consumer-sentiment-plunges-in-march-as-us-iran-conflict-weighs-429387\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan consumer sentiment plunges in March as US-Iran conflict weighs"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\">The main consumer confidence index takes a dive from 39.7 in February to 33.3 in March. And that is the weakest reading since the middle of last year. The US-Iran conflict is threatening to derail the consumer recovery in Japan, not least with higher petrol prices and spillovers to higher inflation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\">And for the BOJ, it isn&#8217;t the good kind of inflation. All of this is part of cost-push inflation, which is what the central bank specifically wants to avoid. For policymakers, it is vital that price pressures are driven up by stronger wages instead.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\">Circling back to the report, you can see how serious the impact of the war in the Middle East is weighing on sentiment:<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\">Looking at the breakdown of the individual components:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Overall livelihood: 29.7 (previously 39.5)<\/li>\n<li>Income growth: 39.8 (previously 42.3)<\/li>\n<li>Employment: 37.6 (previously 46.3)<\/li>\n<li>Willingness to buy durable goods: 26.0 (previously 33.7)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\">It&#8217;s a fall across the board as the mood darkens for Japanese consumers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\">Meanwhile, price expectations also saw a significant increase after having fallen in recent months. The percentage of households expecting prices to &#8220;go up&#8221; shot back up to 93.1% in March. That is up from 85.6% in February before this.<\/p>\n<p>                            This article was written by Justin Low at investinglive.com.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The main consumer confidence index takes a dive from 39.7 in February to 33.3 in March. And that is the weakest reading since the middle of last year. The US-Iran conflict is&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-market-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}