The greatly hyped "third arrow" of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic plans has fallen spectacularly by the wayside. The stock prices on which Abe & Co. had staked their all began falling even as he was explaining his economic strategy in a speech.

Given the failure of the third arrow to impress, Abe is now talking about a fourth and even a fifth arrow to accommodate market demands for more content. Specifically, he now seems committed to corporate tax reductions in a big way, the details of which are apparently to be revealed come September. Thus the government is now completely at the market's beck and call. This is what you get when you become too preoccupied with market dialogue. Place too much value in that dialogue and very soon the conversation becomes a one-way street through which the market's orders come flying at you relentlessly and endlessly.

All this being said, the speech itself was actually quite a remarkable one, in a rather chilly fashion. A very simple exercise in word counting reveals that the word "growth" was uttered 41 times (in Japanese) within an hour or so. That in itself is not so surprising. After all, the speech was actually about his growth strategy.