Japanese households' holdings of stocks and investment trusts have surpassed their insurance and pension assets for the first time.
Citing flow-of-funds data released by the Bank of Japan a day earlier, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on the 18th that holdings of stocks and investment trusts stood at 590 trillion yen as of the end of March, overtaking insurance and pension assets of 579 trillion yen. It is the first such reversal since March 2005, the earliest point for which the data is available.
The trend became more pronounced in preliminary figures for the end of June. Japanese households' total financial assets came to 2,519 trillion yen, up 11% from a year earlier, with holdings of stocks and investment trusts at about 679 trillion yen, a 44% increase. Cash and deposits, by contrast, rose just 0.5% over the same period, to 1,131 trillion yen.
Analysts attribute the shift to the Nikkei 225 topping 70,000 in late June, a weaker yen that inflated the yen value of foreign-currency assets, and the growing use of the expanded NISA tax-free small investment program, which has channeled more money into stocks and other risk assets. Household funds are also flowing into government bonds, where yields have continued to rise. Holdings of government bonds and Fiscal Investment and Loan Program bonds — issued to raise funds for public investment and lending projects — reached 21.9 trillion yen at the end of June, the highest level since June 2013.
