New Whale Seen Moving Tokyo Markets
- Japan Post Bank cutting JGB holdings after record reduction
- BOJ needs to find about 45 trillion yen in JGBs from market
This article is for subscribers only.
As the world’s biggest pension fund nears the end of its switch from sovereign bonds into stocks, investors are looking at Japan Post Bank Co. as the next actor big enough to move markets.
The postal lender, the biggest holder of Japanese government bonds after the central bank, sold 5.1 trillion yen ($42 billion) in JGBs in the three months ended June, after offloading a record amount of the debt last fiscal year. The $1.2 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund, known as the whale, said last week stock and fixed-income holdings were all within 3 percentage points of their targets, suggesting it has almost completed a planned shift into riskier assets including global bonds and shares.