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World's Largest Pension Fund Needs to Sell Japanese Bonds; Japan's Demographic Time Bomb Officially Goes Off

I's now official. Japan's demographic time bomb has gone off. However, don't look for a big crater, at least just yet, because this has started off with a whimper and not a bang.

Inquiring minds note the World's Biggest Pension Fund May Sell Japan Bonds.

Japan’s public pension fund, the world’s largest, said it may become a net seller of bonds to cover payments in the world’s most rapidly aging society.

The Government Pension Investment Fund, which oversees 117.6 trillion yen ($1.4 trillion), in September forecast that it would sell 4 trillion yen in assets in the business year ending March 31 to fund payouts. Sales may be less than that in the year starting April as bonds reach maturity, said Takahiro Mitani, president of the fund, known as GPIF.

“We will likely be a net seller in the market,” Mitani, a former executive director at the Bank of Japan, said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday. “We certainly have to come up with an adequate amount” to pay pensions, he said, declining to elaborate on the amount.

Sales by the fund, which helps oversee public pension funds for Japan’s 37 million retirees, come as the first of Japan’s baby boomers is set to turn 65 in 2012, making them eligible for pension payments.

The GPIF, historically one of the biggest buyers of Japanese debt, held 82.4 trillion yen in domestic bonds, or 70 percent of its assets, as of September, according to the fund’s latest quarterly financial statement. That compares with 12.6 trillion yen in Japanese stocks, or 10.7 percent, 9.6 trillion yen, or 8.2 percent, in foreign bonds and 11.5 trillion yen, or 9.7 percent, in overseas stocks, the report shows.

GPIF doesn’t plan to start investing in so-called alternative assets such as commodities, real estate, infrastructure, private equity or hedge funds because the risks don’t suit its strategy, Mitani said.
‘Too Early’

“It’s too early to get into alternative investments now,” Mitani said. “Japanese investors are conservative and it’s hard to justify to the public investing in asset classes such as commodities, real estate and hedge funds.”

Japan’s 10-year bond yield is the lowest in the world, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Japan’s gross domestic product shrank an annualized 1.1 percent in the three months ended Dec. 31, the Cabinet Office said on Feb. 14, and China’s economy overtook Japan’s as the world’s second largest for 2010.

People aged 65 or older will account for 29 percent of the country’s population in 2020 and almost 40 percent in 2050, according to the statistics bureau. They accounted for 23 percent population at the end of 2010, the highest among the Group of Seven countries, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That compares with 12 percent in 1990.

Japanese pension funds posted the lowest annualized growth among 12 countries between 2004 and 2009, at 2 percent in U.S. dollar terms and unchanged in yen terms, according to the survey. Brazil reported the highest growth, 24 percent in dollars, the report showed.