TOKYO — The year 1959 was in many ways remarkable. America granted Alaska and Hawaii statehood, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and Singapore gained its independence from Britain. The Barbie doll and pantyhose went on sale for the first time; Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue” at a New York studio.
Until Friday, 1959 was also the last time the Nikkei 225 stock index rallied for 12 straight weeks, driven by the quickening pace of Japan’s postwar economic boom. Now the index has repeated that feat. The Japanese business media have been quick to jump on the historical tidbit, trumpeting the Nikkei’s best weekly run in 54 years. The rally in 1959 actually lasted 17 weeks.
This time around, the Nikkei’s rally was motivated by the new Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Mr. Abe has galvanized markets by encouraging bold monetary measures to beat deflation, and hefty government spending to jump-start the economy. The result has been a weakening of the yen by 15 percent over the past three months, a boon for Japanese exporters, and a 25 percent surge in the stock market over the same period.
“The expectations pinned on Prime Minister Abe’s drive to tackle deflation and the strong yen are the driving force pushing stocks toward this postwar record,” the Nikkei newspaper said.
The market’s climb comes despite lackluster earnings by Japanese companies. Of the 54 companies on the Nikkei index that had posted results for the October-to-December quarter by Thursday, nearly two-thirds missed market expectations, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine, the investment research service. And for now, households have remained cool to the market buzz. Japanese household spending fell 0.7 percent in December from a year earlier in price-adjusted real terms, government data released Friday showed.
Nevertheless, Mr. Abe’s policies, dubbed “Abenomics,” are having “a positive psychological effect” on investors and corporate executives, Yasushi Hoshi, director of capital markets at the Daiwa Institute of Research, wrote in a note published Friday. “And the exchange rate and stock prices, if sustained, could themselves push up corporate earnings, leading to better corporate and consumer sentiment in a positive cycle.”
There are already signs that the weaker yen is bolstering some earnings. The video game maker Nintendo raised its profit forecast for its current financial year on Thursday even as the company reported disappointing sales of its game consoles.
Overall investor optimism is giving companies the benefit of the doubt. Honda Motor surprised investors Thursday by trimming its profit outlook, citing sluggish demand in China and Europe, but they still snapped up Honda shares early on Friday, and the stock finished the day 0.3 percent higher.
Still, there are budding concerns that Mr. Abe’s drive will bring about a dangerous bubble. “The results in the near term are an investment boom and bubble, but the longer-run consequences could be soaring inflation and fiscal crisis, followed by lengthy economic stagnation,” Ryutaro Kono, chief economist for Japan at BNP Paribas Securities, wrote in a recent report.
From a historical perspective, the Nikkei index and other asset prices remain far below the heights seen during Japan’s last economic bubble, in the late 1980s. For many global investors, the recent rally has only begun to reverse a slump in Japanese equities that has taken them to levels seen as ridiculously low. Shares on Tokyo’s broader Topix index have long traded below their book value, meaning that prices were less than what the companies would fetch if they were dissolved and their parts sold off.
Now, foreign investors are leading the charge, having poured a net ¥248.6 billion, or $2.7 billion, into Japanese stocks in the fourth week of January alone.
“We think there is latent demand because supply in this space has dwindled over the years and investors are thinking about coming back,” Patric de Gentile-Williams of Financial Risk Management, told the Hedge Funds Review on Wednesday, after making a $25 million investment in a Japanese equity fund run by Arena Capital Management. “If the new prime minister’s actions have a big effect, they might come back in a big way.”
Is Japan, then, on course for a wider recovery?
Not so fast, Yusuke Shimoda, an economist at the Japan Research Institute in Tokyo, wrote in a note to clients this past week. Japan’s recovery could sputter, he said, if the government cannot match its asset-inflating moves with growth strategies for the real economy. “It will be critical to put a growth strategy in action that will start a self-sustained recovery,” Mr. Shimoda said.
Nevertheless, Japan forecast Monday that its economy would grow by 2.5 percent in the fiscal year that starts in April, raising an earlier projection of 1.7 percent — an impressive rate for the world’s third-largest economy after the United States and China. Impressive, that is, unless investors look back to Japan’s rate of gross domestic product growth in 1959, which was 12.1 percent.
Nikkei’s Best Weekly Run in 54 Years
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Nikkei’s Best Weekly Run in 54 Years
