How the yen carry trade could return By John Plender
Published: March 6 2007 02:00 |
It is a curious reflection on Japan's financial relationship with the rest of the world that throughout the 1980s bubble and the subsequent period of economic stagnation global capital markets felt relatively little backwash from the country's protracted banking crisis and deflationary trauma.
Now that the longest Japanese recovery since the second world war has returned the country to some semblance of economic normality, the loose monetary policy needed to stave off deflation has reconnected Japan to global markets with a vengeance via the yen carry trade, whereby people borrow at low interest rates in yen to buy higher yielding assets in currencies such as the New Zealand dollar or the Hungarian forint. 第二次大戦以来最長の経済回復が日本に戻った今、デフレから免れるために必要とされた通貨緩和策は円キャリートレードを介して日本を世界市場に猛烈な勢いで再結合させてきた。円キャリートレードでは人々は低利で円を借り、ニュージーランドドルやハンガリアン フォリントのような通貨でより高収益な資産を購入する。
This trade, which has busily fuelled a global glut of liquidity, finally went into reverse last week. The continuing dramatic appreciation of the yen, which has wiped out many carry traders' profits, has become self-feeding. What does the resulting turmoil tell us about the world's second largest economy and the future of the carry trade?
Much comment assumes the carry trade is the work of fund management professionals. Yet the surge in the yen is as likely to have been prompted by housewives, who control the household finances in Japan, as high-octane hedge funds. After years of feeling risk averse, Japanese private investors have responded to economic recovery by deserting low-yielding bank deposits for higher yielding foreign bonds.
The number of post offices in Japan's huge postal savings system through which investment trusts are sold doubled to 1,155 in the year to October 2006. More than half of the funds in these fast-growing trusts is invested in foreign bonds. Private investors are also active buyers of uradashi bonds, foreign IOUs floated in Japan in non-yen currencies.
According to JPMorgan Chase, Japanese retail investors' commitment to foreign bonds since the Bank of Japan started its zero interest rate policy in 1999 amounts to Y30,000bn (£132bn). Whether this can strictly be called carry trading is moot, since much of the investment is not financed by borrowing.
But the investment is vastly greater than that of hedge funds, whose exposure to the carry trade, JP Morgan estimates, has been negative over the past two years, at a time when the hedge funds' emerging market equity investments have significantly increased. The hedge funds' short positions in the yen have also been smaller than Japanese retail investors', trading on margin.
How much the reversal of the carry trade owes respectively to hedge funds and Japanese investors is impossible to know. But even if hedge funds are less exposed to currency risk, they are more leveraged than retail investors. While many will have insured the currency risk in carry positions with credit derivatives, they may have been forced to sell equities in the more liquid developed world equity markets to cover loss making positions in emerging markets and in wildly volatile credit markets.
The paradox here is that while the risk appetite of Japanese households has been seriously whetted in global capital markets, the readiness of those same households to raise their domestic consumption has been lacking.
Loose monetary policy has worked chiefly on the corporate sector through its impact on the yen, while failing to galvanise households into more spending. It is yen weakness that has permitted Japan's formidable export machine to drive the recovery in a manner reminiscent of the old Japan Inc of the 1970s and 1980s.
A further aspect of the paradox is that while Japanese investors have punted furiously in New Zealand bonds and Vietnamese equities, it has been left to foreign investors to drive Japanese equities higher.
The future of the carry trade hinges partly on the economic background. The growth of the carry trade, like the strange complacency about risk in credit markets, has rested on the assumption that global - and especially US - economic conditions will remain benign. The deterioration in recent US economic data helps explain the current financial turmoil. But if the US economy picks up, it seems likely that Japanese retail investors will be back.
Japanese households hold more than half their financial assets in cash and at the bank. Only 2.4 per cent is in foreign currency. So unless the Bank of Japan raises interest rates more rapidly and sharply than anyone expects after the recent 0.25 point rise to 0.5 per cent, a small shift in asset allocation in pursuit of yield could have a big impact on the yen.
But even if the global economy slows, the carry trade could come back in a different guise. As Jesper Koll, chief economist of Merrill Lynch Japan Securities, argues, rates of return in a mature Japanese economy are low relative to the rest of the world. As long as Japanese interest rates remain low, corporate Japan, with its balance sheet back in order and risk appetite restored, has a huge incentive to go out and buy the world. Since last Tuesday, the world looks much cheaper for anyone borrowing in yen to make acquisitions.