When Aiful Corp. sold Japan’s first-ever junk bond to the public earlier this year, it offered a small ray of hope to yield-starved investors in yen assets.
The consumer lender’s issuance met the wishes of pension funds and life insurers, with more than $7.2 trillion under management, for whom a high-yield bond market in Japan would ease the pain of more than three years of negative interest rates. With benchmark yields now tumbling toward a record low, the quest for returns is growing ever more urgent.
