Watanabe invites foreign investors to come and play
Speaking at Euromoney’s Japan Fixed-Income Forum in March, Sumi said: “The super-long sector of the JGB market was being traded quite actively at the end of 2006. We won’t go ahead with a 40-year bond no matter what, but we would like to test the market.”
Reacting to international market sentiment is a priority for the MoF now that the domestic investor base for government debt is shrinking. Foreign holdings of Japanese government bonds account for only about 5% of the total, and Sumi conceded that withholding taxes and the relative paucity of issuance at longer maturities have been among the major limiting factors.
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