What Takaichi's win means for global markets

Election fever in Japan delivered a very clear result at the weekend, and Japanese stocks rushed to an all-time high in response. Prime Minister Sane Takeichi called a snap election just a few weeks ago and her party, the Liberal Democratic Party, won a massive majority, a supermajority, in fact. in the country's lower house of parliament. With more than two thirds of the seats and the ability to override the less powerful upper house of Parliament, Takaichi can now do

Well, pretty much. Whatever she likes. Today on the show, we're gonna talk about why this matters to investors both in Japan and around the world. This is Unhedged, the Markets and Finance podcast from the Financial Times. And Pushkin, I'm Katie Martin, a markets columnist at FT Towers in London, where it is raining all the time. And I'm joined by the team in New York, His Excellency Mr.

Mr Robert Armstrong from the Unhedged Newsletter and his trusty sidekick, Hakyoung Kim. Hakyung, you kept Rob in his place on the podcast the other day when I was not around. I like this. I was told I mogged him, so I'll take that one. I I th I'm gonna assume it means showed great respect. Great deference. Um so what I like one of the things I like about the the elections in Japan is that just like Bish bosh done

Over. You call an election, you do an election, it's done, it's finished. None like the US is like in a permanent state of some sort of election cycle, whereas Japan and the UK get this stuff just done nice and quickly. But you do it over and over again. You do it efficiently. But constantly. That is also true. But yeah, this is m this is momentous financially. I mean for people like us.

It's like Japan is one of the big centers of gravity in the world of finance. And Sane Takaichi, whose name I hope I'm getting correct, has a different view.

Of how that country oughta be run financially. I think this is a big deal. I'm not quite sure what it means, but it sure means something. Yeah. Yeah. So, um Hack Young, talk to us a bit about what what markets have done after this'cause There was a reasonable chance that you know, you would have said on paper, right, Takichi wins a massive majority

She's gonna go ahead with like massive spending plans and this should on paper spook the Japanese government bond market, but like not at all. And stocks have loved it. Like tell us what's kind of happened here. Yeah, so Takaichi originally took office in October and stocks have basically hit record after record since then and that's what they did after the snap election on Sunday. But In the bond market which had a bit of a freak out in January after she said that she would scrap the food tax.

or suspend it for two years. The bond market reaction was surprisingly muted, I would say, um given the gravity of her win. And likewise with the yen the reaction was relatively muted compared to yeah, the scale of her win and previous reactions it had to like statements that she's made on fiscal policy.

But yes, stocks love it. So stocks are up something like seven percent, depending on which index you're looking at. They've had a massive push higher since this re-election. Like w why do we think that is? I think it's the growth prospects that her fiscal expansionary plans are promising. And she's promised a lot of investment in the defense sectors and also in the tech sectors to so to kind of make Japan into this.

Defense powerhouse and such. Stocks have really cheered that and there's always been that kind of Japan discount that's been healing for the past few years. But

After her election, investors have become even more optimistic. But I think it's really important to note that a lot of domestic investors aren't quite buying it yet. They're still opting into the US stock market more so than their domestic market. I I mean I think Global investors and we've talked about this at great length on the show, global investors have been moving their chips around a little bit. Everybody was massively overweight the US.

And I wonder if part of what we're seeing is global big money, real money global investors are taking a harder look at international. Yeah. that s sononomics are d are we allowed to use that term, sononomics Takaichi trade is what we want to call it. That is that's inflationary broadly, right? And inflation world, you know, bonds down, stocks up. Yeah.

Yeah. In relative terms at least. Stocks don't love inflation, but they hate it less than bonds do. Yeah. And the I think the backdrop here is quite important to bear in mind, right? So there was Like back in the day, like very, very early nineties, th there was like Japanese stocks went completely bananas and there was just this massive crack.

Like a huge crash, like a sort of, you know, generation Yeah, a generation defining crash in the Japanese uh stock market. And it took literally thirty years to get back to base. You know, Japan was absolutely in the doghouse for the longest time. International investors were just not interested. They were like, No, no, no, we lost our shirt on this thing and we are not going back into it. And it took a really long time and a set of like really quite punchy reforms.

It sounds slightly ridiculous, but sort of forcing Japanese companies to make a profit and treat their shareholders nicely. But this all these big sort of corporate governance reforms and that that's been a really slow burner. But people buy the story now. People buy the story and as you like as even you are admitting, Rob, people are looking for opportunities outside the US now and Japan is a pretty good bet. You know, if you like AI and tech, but you don't like the US.

For some reason. Then Japan is a good place to go, you know. Same story with Korea, which has had an incredible run in its stock market too. So It just feels like a lot of stars are aligning. You know, I take Hakyong's point that there are still some investors both in Japan and elsewhere that are a little bit nervous about it. But it I feel like this could be a bit of a bit of a moment for the long term in in Japanese markets.

I guess we should also talk about the incredible change in the yield environment in Japan. I mean, just like the stocks were dead. For thirty years, Japanese bonds yielded plus or minus nothing. Yeah. Forever. Yeah. Until about four years ago. Yeah. The Japanese bond market was the place where fun went to die for the longest time.

Like the like bonds simply did not move in price, which meant that yields didn't move around at all. And a big reason for that is that the Bank of Japan, the central bank, just like owns a massive chunk of all the outstanding Japanese government bonds. So even though you've got a debt to GDP ratio of last time I checked two hundred and twenty seven percent. Yeah, something in excess of two hundred percent.

The reason why that does not like spill over into a huge bond market crisis, which it would in the US or the UK, you better believe it if you tried to borrow that much money relative to GDP, is that

like the central bank owns a lot of the bonds, a lot of d like big serious domestic investors own a lot of the bonds. They're not gonna torch their own bond market. But we have seen it move in the past few years a as as you say, Rob. Like partly because like we've just finally got a bit of inflation and some of that is like the long tail of COVID and some of it is the long tail of

you know, these efforts to make companies more profitable. But there is an idea out there that the Bank of Japan has been a little bit too slow to raise rates to deal with this. So you have got Like really like for Japan, pretty high bond yields at the moment. And that I think it i over and above the move in stocks, that's the thing to really watch.

here, I reckon. Just to give listeners a sense of the scale of what our uh has has happened here. As recently as twenty twenty two, the five year Japanese bond yielded a round zero. Now it's one point seven percent UR. the thirty has gone from like a bit over half a percent thirty year, half a percent to three and a half percent. And in bond market terms These are massive, epic generational moves.

They are. And a lot of the pressure is at what you call the long end, right? It is in the sort of thirty year segment of the market and I think like 10-year Japanese government bonds is now yielding about uh two point three percent, which again doesn't sound like a huge amount, but for Japan that is huge. So I was talking to a European asset manager just earlier today, actually, and and he was saying, look,

At those sorts of yields for Japan, like this is a European asset manager. He was like, even we might have a bit of that. That sounds okay. Like you get decent money out of Japanese government bonds now. But more importantly for domestic investors, and there are some really huge kind of pension and life insurer kind of investors in Japan. They look at the yields that they can get on their domestic government bonds now and they think

Why would I bother going to the US? Why would I bother buying US government bonds when I can get this much at home? Why would and even maybe why would I bother bother buying European government bonds if I can get these rates at home? So here's a plausible path forward that this investor was sketching out to me earlier, which is okay. Stocks are doing well, but the Japanese yen has been like quite quite rubbish for quite a long time. But there is a world in which

that repatriation thing happens, right? Japanese investors stay at home in their bond market and overseas investors stop buying Japanese government bonds for p some of them for the first time ever. that pushes up the yen. And so if you are buying Japanese stocks, if they keep performing as they have been doing recently, which is very nicely, you get a double whammy. You get

good stock market performance and potentially you get a pickup in the Japanese currency cutting happy days. Why would you take on all the kind of US risks when you've got what looks like a much cleaner picture over here? And the worry there's a kind of generalized worry among bears. about the American stock and bond markets, that there will be an enormous sucking sound as capital, both Japanese and possibly American or European, moves from west to east.

Listeners will remember a few weeks ago that Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, made a kind of performance of maybe considering intervening in the yen dollar market. A and part of the reason for that may have been He's worried that the big spike in Japanese yields will make US yields follow, which is the last thing he wants. He wants yields down, mortgage prices down, whatever. So there is this general worry that all this money will rush east and that will have implications for

U.S. and European assets. However, I would just note that and I I should know this number, but I don't, the size of the Japanese bond market is quite small, a fraction of the U.S. bond market. I mean it's a bit like an elephant trying to go through a mouse hole for all the money that's in the American bond market, uh or even a good portion of it, to try to get into the Japanese bond market. It just

Only so much of that can happen'cause there's not enough of the Japanese bonds around. It's certainly true that the Japanese bond market is less of a kind of it's not in the driving seat of the global market in the way that the US is. But here's another thing if you're looking for reasons to be worried about this whole situation. Do you guys, Rob and Hack Young, remember where you were at the beginning of August twenty twenty four?

Oh I had just come back from Japan actually. Oh very good, very good. I was lying on a on a sun lounger in Turkey and the markets, do you remember, just very, very briefly and kind of out of nowhere, just absolutely lost it. Like there was a big move higher in the yen. There was a bit of a disappointment on like a sort of on a on a US economic data release.

And Lots of like Japanese money came out of the US stock market and came back home and the yen went screaming higher and everything just went terrible for a little while to the point where there I am on my son lounger in Turkey with people texting me saying People are talking about an emergency rate cut in the States. What the hell is going on? And and Japanese stocks fell like twelve percent in a day.

There is this possibility that I think we need to be aware of that there are kind of global flows of money that when they get like quite rapid that can get really destabilizing.

really quickly. I'm not saying this is gonna happen this time around, but I am saying like This is why we bother talking about the Japanese stock market and about, you know, the effects of Japanese elections on on markets is because

all these things are connected and this is one of the little Jenga pieces that you can take out and things can fall over really quickly. It's kind of what you just described has kind of been the theme of the show mm in a way. Or like one of the long arc plots of the Unhedged podcast uh over the last year or so has been, you know, since Trump's election Some big geopolitical and if I may geo financial pieces are being moved around.

And Japan is one of them, Europe fiscal is one of them, US policy monetary and fiscal is another. And we're all kind of groping for what the implications are, but it's a genuinely new world. I mean, we don't know we don't know how to price this stuff right now. No. But I think to Rob's point earlier about the J G B market just being so much smaller than the Treasury market, I think the much smaller scale of the J G B market is also what

makes it more vulnerable to any sort of fiscal concerns like what we saw in January. I think the the sum of trading that kind of destabilized the market back in January was a much smaller sum than what would kind of trigger volatility in the US Treasury market. That is the flip side. That's a good point. Yeah. What do we think? How does this pan out from here?

Does this become some sort of macro disaster or actually is there a kind of long, slow process of money flooding into Japanese government bonds from at home and overseas? Uh that's kind of what I think. I think this is this is a positive result for for stocks and I don't see the Japanese government bond market blowing up. It's notable that the number of people who've said for the past twenty years that the Japanese government bond market is gonna blow up.

Is very large and they have always been wrong. And I don't really see how that's different this time. Obviously, I could be wrong, but like. What do you reckon, Hack Young? Like w d d does stocks, for example, just like keep on pushing higher as like more people get convinced to jump in?

I think the stock market Certainly you could say so, just because the discount has been so severe for four decades and then you have the corporate government's reforms like we're talking about, that's certainly bullish or just to even get on a level playing field, right, with so many other global markets.

I do think with the bond market something that we haven't talked about yet is BOJ independence. That's been another concern since Takaichi got elected in October because she's spoken up before about how she thinks race are stupid and thought. not really confidence inspiring, right? Um so I think that's a really big part on investors' minds. I can't quite put my finger on it.

That that reminds me, I I gather Trump says that his his nomination for the next head of the Fed, Kevin Walsh, is going to take US economic growth to fifteen percent. Which is awesome. It's gonna be awesome. I mean we joke, we joke about this stuff, but to answer your question, Katie, which is I think is a good one, you know, there's nothing per se about what Sunitakaichi represents. that should throw a monkey wrench into a rec the recovering Japanese stock market or Create.

the s significant instability in the currency of the bond market, although the currency seems likely to weaken more and the bond market, the yields tend to go up. But the problem with what we have going on right now is there's so many things globally going on at once. Mm. Fighting against each other. Overlap between these things. makes the result really unpredictable. So to use your Jenga metaphor, we're pulling a lot of the little blocks out all at the same time. So

Good luck to all of us. And we just don't want one of those summertime blow ups like we had a couple of years ago. Because we've already had too much news. So if the people in charge can make sure that that doesn't happen, that would be great.

Listeners, we are going to be back in just one second with long short. Okie dokie, it is time for long short, that part of the show where we go long a thing we love or short a thing we hate. Rob what you sayin'? I'm gonna go short Google's 100 year bond, which they plan to sell. By the way, I think they're going to sell it just fine. I think there'll be a market for it, especially d if they don't try to size it too large. I just think

taking a lot of duration risk. You know, this is gonna be a very uh rate and inflation sensitive instrument at a time of great uncertainty, not only in tech, but in rate policy. Like I just I'm just a b a boring person who's frightened by markets and I'm not touching that thing with your loyalty. Fair. Hak young what you saying? I am going to go short on streaming services.

I think with the Olympics going on, but you have assuming services in every country just kind of cannibalizing the coverage of it. I think they're shooting themselves in the foot. And they're creating a situation where they're overestimating I think viewership demand. Mhm. And it's already an industry that has so much M and A that I think It's just going to reach a point where they all just start eating each other all over again. Yeah. So short streaming services. Wow. Bold. I'm gonna go short

Like I don't want to be mean, but some of the winter Olympic sports are very boring. Like Come on. But I'll take the other side of this trade. I love the Winter Olympics. Yeah, but like the Louge I don't get it. Like the like th you win or lose this thing by like a few hundredths of a second and it's just like a bunch of people barreling down like w you watch a couple and you're like, Oh look, they're barreling down this ice tube at a million miles an hour.

I hope they're okay and like there's lots of peril. But when you get onto like the twentieth one you're like, Okay, I think I get the idea. they're going down at you Katie hates fun. That's the moral of this story. I liked the snowboarding, the big air, the the women's big air yesterday was very good, but the luge.

greatest of respects to all of our lougie listeners. It was just not my cup of tea, I'm sorry. So that is it for today. We are going to be back in your ears on Thursday. So listen up then. Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Brian Erstadt. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. We had additional help from Topha Forehead. Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio. Special thanks to Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Greta Cohn and Natalie Sadler.

FT Premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free, and a 30-day free trial is available to everyone else. Just go to FT.com slash unhedged offer. I'm Katie Martin. Thanks for listening.