Foreign Ownership of Japanese Debt Rises to Record on Europe
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Foreign ownership of Japanese government debt rose to a record in 2011, while Japanese households’ holdings fell to the lowest since 2005, signaling increasing dependence on investors abroad to finance the world’s largest public debt.
Overseas investors owned 8.3 percent of JGBs as of the end of the fiscal year in March, the Bank of Japan said in a report released in Tokyo today. This was the highest since 1979, the first year for which comparable data is available. Japanese households owned 3 percent of issued bonds.