Source: Bloomberg
The above chart shows the movement in the ASX200 over last week. It closed before the Japanese earthquake on Friday 11th March on basically the same level ot closed on Friday 18th. Given the market is slightly up today (0.35% at the time of writing) means that since the earthquake the Australian market is actually up! Japan is only our second biggest trading partner, buys a lot of Australian stuff, has sold all of our bonds so that it can pay for its rescue, but our market is up!
I’m sure there’s something I’ve missed, but I find this short term macro-result for our market baffling.