Japan’s Current-Account Surplus Masks Export Weakness
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Japan posted a fourth straight current-account surplus, as income from overseas investments masks the failure of the yen’s slide to boost exports.
The excess in the widest measure of trade was 522.8 billion yen ($5.1 billion) in May, the finance ministry reported in Tokyo today, beating the median forecast of 417.5 billion yen in a Bloomberg survey. Exports rose 2 percent from a year earlier.