Japanese investors have been leaving their home markets preferring to send their money overseas in an attempt to battle their country’s unprecedented quantitative easing. In fact, the volume of bonds marked in dollars and euros bought by Japanese investors swelled to a four-month high in November.
A net 1.48 trillion yen ($14.3 billion) worth of dollar bonds and 972.9 billion yen of euro bonds were purchased by fund managers from Japan, which makes it the largest purchase among currencies that the Ministry of Finance data has tracked. Australian-dollar bond purchases have also increased for a second consecutive month that ended 11 months of sales.
Overall last year, the yen depreciated 17 percent, the most in a single year since 1979, as reported by Bloomberg Correlation Weighted Indexes that monitor 10 major currencies. Japanese central bank governor Haruhiko Kuroda effected the currencies decline through the implementation of policies that suppressed local yields by reviving inflation, and thus also prompting Japanese investors to look for higher returns in overseas assets. December and January saw a stalling of buying with 513 billion yen in bond sales taking place over five weeks, though the weekly data has as yet to be broken up by country.
At its meeting last month, the BOJ vouched to expand the country’s monetary base from 60 trillion yen per year to 70 trillion yen. As a measure against deflation, policy makers double monthly bond purchases to over 7 trillion yen last April.
According to a report by the Ministry of Finance, the deficit of the nation’s current account increased to 592.8 billion yen in November, the greatest gap ever recorded in data that reach back to 1985.
