A fall of about 20% (annualised) in second-quarter Japanese GDP is not a big event these days - but for what it is worth, this is how we arrive at our forecasts Private consumption down 19% At 56% of real GDP, private consumer spending is the biggest component of the GDP forecast, so if we get this wrong, it will colour the entire forecast. So we take two approaches to this. Firstly, we seasonally adjust the monthly household expenditure (MHE) data, which is a nominal series, so we also ought to deflate this (though with inflation so low currently, it's not essential). As an audit on this approach, we also take the ... (full story)