It's Thursday March 17th and this is market foolry. I'm Matt Greer sitting in for Chris Hill today and joining me in studio is James Early from income investor and Seth Jason and Charlie Travers from Hidden Gems.

Guys, happy St. Patrick's Day.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

As we've done this week, we're going to begin the show by talking about Japan.

James Goldman Sachs has come out and estimated that the disaster could reach $200 billion in terms of what

it costs Japan.

That would be around 3% of Japan's GDP.

What do you make of it all?

Well, Mac, a lot of people are talking about GDP,

and that's not really the best gauge of what's going on here

for two reasons.

First, that infrastructure spending to rebuild factors into the GDP just mathematically speaking

so that might actually provide a boost to GDP.

The second is that these regions collectively, this is an industrial area of Japan but they still

only make up about 4% of Japan's total GDP. So if you

take reduce their output by half or a third or if I don't know fourth whatever might

happen it's still not a major thing at least according to the Japanese government's numbers.

So I would say it's not worth arguing about that like they're doing in the media.

The better thing to think about is this is affecting a country that has been borrowing heavily for 20 plus years.

I think debt is now twice or more than twice a Japan's GDP and that's going to be the real story as we go years down the road.

Japan has to really, really have to sort of dig itself out of this debt hole.

Seth?

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