While full-time worker pay clearly matters, it is also important to watch wage inflation for part-timers. That this is already running at 4% illustrates the real tightness in the labour market. There's more upside ahead, with reports that the big retailer Aeon is planning another 7% hike in 2025.

Headline inflation ticked up in December to back above 2%, but core continued to ease. With property cooling too, the likelihood of further monetary tightening is receding. At the same time, the strength of semi equities and the services PMI mean no urgency to cut either.

Taiwan's export orders data today show another decline in the overseas production ratio, especially for electronics products. That implies some move in the supply-chain from China, which helps boost Taiwan's growth, but at the expense of more direct trade and a surging trade surplus with the US.

Today's data show inflation excluding all food and energy in November at 2% saar. Some of the details are also firm, with the diffusion stable and a further pick-up in rental inflation. That though is still at less than 1%, and anyway, wage inflation now seems more important for the BOJ than CPI.

The weak JPY is having little impact on Japan's export performance. Yesterday's November data show export volumes still very sluggish, and continuing to underperform the rest of the region. Services are doing better, though even here, Japan isn't clearly outperforming.

Services sentiment in the PMI is recovering from the October drop, but not as quickly as in other surveys. The tone on jobs and prices survived that dip, and concerns about "labour constraints and the impact of rising costs", with feed through to output prices, were prominent again in December.

With the strong trend growth in TSMC's sales since the end of 2023 holding, it makes sense that the pick-up in manufacturing wage growth is too. Neither TSMC nor manufacturing are the whole economy, but they are important components, and put Taiwan's cycle in a very different state to Korea.

Yesterday's BIS credit data for Q2 show why shifting to "loose" monetary policy isn't simple. The loosening of 2008-09 kicked off a rise in credit that hasn't stopped even though policy since then has been "prudent", and that in turn been a big obstacle to policy officially turning loose again.

On my estimate, China's seasonally adjusted trade surplus in November reached a new all-time high. This is partly about firm exports, more evident in volume than values. But it is also about weak imports, which however they are measured, have now been going sideways for almost two years.

In YoY value terms, November data confirm that the export cycle has peaked. However, there still isn't much slowing yet because in MoM terms, exports are still gradually trending up. Moreover, at least through October, exports volumes remained strong. Semi is leading the rise.

Today's 2nd release of Q3 GDP data was revised up to 1.2% saar, on the back of stronger capex and exports, but consumption was revised lower. The rise in today's EW survey suggests growth has improved further in Q4. The cycle is solid more than spectacular, but shows no damage from the July hike.