(Bloomberg) — Arif Husain says he was early in sounding the alarm on Japan’s rising interest rates last year, which he described as the “San Andreas fault of finance.”
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The head of fixed-income at T. Rowe Price warned that investors have “just seen the first shift in that fault, and there is more” market volatility ahead after the nation’s rate hike in July helped trigger a violent reversal of the yen carry trade.
While a hawkish Bank of Japan and jitters around slowing US growth helped trigger voracious demand for the yen on Aug. 5, investors may be ignoring a deeper root of the global swoon that cascaded across stocks, currencies and bonds, Husain wrote in a report. This includes a mountain of Japanese money invested offshore that risks getting shipped back home as rates march ever higher in the world’s fourth-largest economy.
“The scapegoating of the yen carry trade ignores the start of a bigger and deeper trend,” according to Husain, whose firm oversees about $1.57 trillion in assets. “BOJ monetary tightening and its impact on the flow of global capital is far from simple, and it will have a large influence over the next few years.”
The sudden abandonment of the yen carry trade, which involves selling Japan’s currency to invest in higher yielding assets, helped sink the Nikkei 225 Stock Average by the most since 1987 and fueled a surge in the VIX index of stock market volatility. Economists briefly predicted the Federal Reserve would need to swoop in with half-point cuts or act between meetings — the kind of step usually reserved for a crisis.
While the yen has settled in a mid-140s trading range against the dollar, volatility remains elevated. The Fed’s anticipated rate cuts and further BOJ tightening could jolt markets again sooner rather than later.
Husain, who has nearly three decades of investing experience, favors an overweight allocation to Japanese government bonds on the view capital is likely to flow back to the nation as yields climb. He also likes an underweight position in US Treasuries — securities he sees potentially coming under pressure as Japanese institutions move out of the US for home.
Yields on Japan’s 10-year government bonds rose one basis point to 0.915% on Tuesday, the highest since Aug. 6.
“At some point, higher Japanese yields could attract the country’s huge life insurance and pension investors back into JGBs from other high-quality government bonds,” Husain wrote. “In effect, this would rearrange demand in the global market.”
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