Japan’s Great Repatriation? Don’t count on quick returns
When Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi recently urged the country’s Government Pension Investment Fund to boost domestic investment, her remarks were quite naturally met with a flurry of research notes and a subsequent wave of long-end buying and curve-flattener trades from hedge fund participants expecting a move.
The GPIF already had one very strong financial motivation to start investing more at home – long-tenor Japanese government bonds (JGBs) are now consistently yielding more on an FX-hedged basis than their US Treasury equivalents. Now, add to that some political pressure, and a review by the GPIF of its asset allocations in the near future would seem to be a foregone conclusion.
But speaking with bank rates sources in Tokyo recently, the feeling is that while there may be some tinkering at the edges in the short term, any serious changes to the portfolio will be much further in the future than many funds may hope.
Holding $2.1 trillion in assets, close to half of which is invested overseas, the GPIF’s decisions on where to invest its money have always carried a lot of weight in global markets. On this occasion, however, what the GPIF chooses to do could also determine whether it is payday for the curve-flattener positions that hedge funds piled into once again back in September. If the GPIF invests more in JGBs, the trade idea goes, long-end yields will fall, the curve will flatten and flattener trades will pay out.
Under its current five-year investment plan, agreed at the last strategic asset allocation review in March 2025, the GPIF maintains an equal 25% weighting across domestic stocks, foreign stocks, domestic bonds and foreign bonds. But the fund doesn’t need to wait until 2030 to reallocate to domestic assets – discretional adjustments of up to 6% can be made in either direction on any of the asset classes if changing market conditions demand it.
A senior sell-side rates source in regular discussions with the GPIF says it’s possible that in the short term it uses its discretionary powers to sell 1–2% of its US equity holdings and reallocate into JGBs. But he describes traders at the fund as prudent, and doesn’t believe it will rush to make any larger changes any time soon.
“Maybe in the next fiscal year we are going to hear something new but, in the near term, I don’t think they’re going to take any big actions,” he says.
A GPIF committee meeting on August 21, its first publicly announced meeting during the holiday month in seven years, spurred further market speculation that a change in asset allocations could be coming soon. But an October 5 Bloomberg report said the GPIF did not discuss reallocations at all in its September meeting, pouring cold water on any near-term changes.
Moving slowly
There is a good reason for the GPIF to take its time on shifting out of Treasuries and into JGBs.
The fund is so large that even a modest shift towards domestic assets would reverberate through foreign exchange, stock and debt markets in Japan and abroad.
These reverberations would have consequences for the GPIF’s portfolio as well. Selling a large amount of its US bond holdings and investing in JGBs would cause the Japanese yen to strengthen and any amount of the GPIF’s $931 billion worth of overseas assets left unhedged would lose value. It could also push down yields on JGBs and push up yields on US Treasuries, potentially undermining the very relative yield advantage that the GPIF would be hoping to capture.
Then there is the unwinding of the yen carry trade. If the yen were to rapidly appreciate, investors who borrowed cheaply in the currency to invest overseas could be on the hook for some big losses. The triggering of stop-loss orders because of this could then drive further yen buying, creating a classic self-reinforcing loop.
Hedge funds already have a chequered history with flattener trades on the JGB curve, having been stopped out several times in the past year. The two-year versus 30-year spread that investors have targeted recently had been trending lower to hit 212 basis points on September 9, but has since widened to hit 230bp as of October 6.
After a torrid year in global rates markets, the last thing the fast money community needs is another pain trade.
Editing by Lukas Becker
