Interesting twist of events.
The chairman of the advisory group to Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the world largest retirement pool of retirement savings, advocates that the pension fund substantially reduce their holdings of Japanese Government Bonds (JGB) holdings by selling now.
From the Bloomberg (bold mine)
The world’s biggest retirement fund needs to cut local debt holdings now because Japan’s government will follow an advisory panel’s recommendation that the wealth manager seek higher returns, the panel’s head said. Bonds fell.The 124 trillion yen ($1.22 trillion) Government Pension Investment Fund should pare domestic debt immediately to 52 percent of assets, its lower limit, in part by selling to the Bank of Japan, said Takatoshi Ito, chairman of the advisory group. The investments comprised 58 percent of the fund’s holdings as of Sept. 30.“GPIF needs to start reducing bonds as soon as possible,” Ito said in an interview in Tokyo today. “Now is the right time to sell, while the BOJ is buying.”The comments show a rift between Ito, an academic handpicked by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to help overhaul Japan’s state-backed pension plans, and Takahiro Mitani, president of GPIF since 2010. The central bank, which is buying more than 7 trillion yen of bonds a month, will fail in its goal of spurring 2 percent inflation and the risk of owning so much domestic debt was overstated by Ito’s panel, Mitani said this week.
And here is the kicker: (bold mine)
Mitani said in a Dec. 4 interview with Bloomberg News that inflation is less of a risk to GPIF than many people, including Ito, assume, because the fund is a long-term investor and can hold bonds until redemption. Consumer-price increases will probably stay between 0.1 percent and 1 percent, missing the BOJ’s 2 percent target, he said.Mitani “doesn’t seem to understand that it’s about mark-to-market valuation,” Ito said today.If GPIF doesn’t start reducing its holdings before inflation takes root in Japan, the fund will exacerbate a slump in bond prices by needing to sell as demand from other investors wanes, Ito said.“If inflation reaches 2 percent, and yields rise to 3 percent, and then they start trying to sell domestic bonds, we’ll see disaster in the markets,” he said.
10 year JGBs appear to have reacted dramatically to the above comments with a sharp spike in yields.
Meanwhile the yen fell hard (above is the USD-Yen)…
…as Japan’s equity benchmark the Nikkei 225 “celebrated” the yen’s fall ending the session higher by .81%
Even people close to Japan's powers-that-be acknowledge that JGBs signify a ticking time bomb.This also reveals how vulnerable the global financial system is.