Stephen, you make excellent counterpoints which are no doubt benefitted by your experiences as a resident of Japan.
I have only one thing to add about the postal savings system 10 yr. bonds that mature this coming year:
1- The people putting money into the Postal system did it for two reasons. Remember that it was being invested there 10 years ago, at 10% (or probably a bit less) but at that time Japan was on the verge of conquering the world economically... the bull market run had given handsome returns ... and you could get RICH buying land (speculating really, as golf memberships were also thought of a way to buy into real estate), SOOO why would someone put money in a drab, unexciting account that paid 10% (or less)? Because for the most part it appealed to them as they were most likely conservative investors to begin with. Partly my theory but I must conceed I was also discussing the various scenarios for the Postal deposits in the coming year with a friend at Daiwa Securities, and their strategy was to try to steer as much money from those account as possible (understandable) but not into stocks, rather into JGBs or bond portfolios. Nevertheless, tehy didn't expect more than 10% would be sent to stocks, huge amount you might say though... This one, just like Y2K is an unknown quantity to say the least... Obviously if the market happens to be going up at that point , more people might be tempted to pile in .
Obviously Japanese investors have gotten screwed on their international holdings, and no doubt that the insurance companies made a bad decision by buying up Euro-denominated bonds last year - they were attracted to the yields relative to JGBs and they also probably forecasted the Euro to strengthen and the Yen to weaken, making it a good investment. Now they have sold because they realized they were dead wrong. I don't see retail investors making the same mistake in Japan when the 10 yr. bonds mature. They can either reinvest at 2.5% or go in the stock market. Those are the only two choices. The retail investors are not going to go abroad as they are well aware of the mistakes of the Japanese insurance companies this past year - its been well-publicized. There is also a pessimistic view of the U.S. market worldwide, which should further dissuade the Japanese from allocating fresh monies to wall street.
The JGB market will probably be supported, to an extent, by purchases from Japanese corporations as they continue to unwind their cross-shareholdings. This process is well-underway and should be completed within the next year. The proceeds are most likely to be used for cap spending and JGB purchases. |
