It’s Wednesday, so a few topics. Tomorrow, I plan to address the issue that the US economy is heading into recession. The short assessment is that it doesn’t look like it to me despite the relatively poor labour market data that came out at the end of last week. But there is certainly a lot of fluctuating fortunes being recorded around the globe at present. Recent Japanese data is quite interesting and I discuss it in what follows. We should also remember that yesterday was the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing – a very sad day in human history. Constantly reminding us of the damage that the US bombing caused should warn us off war altogether and nuclear weapons and technology specifically. Unfortunately, the trends are working against such a view. And we also have some music to listen to while cogitating over those issues.