America’s Billionaires Love Japanese Stocks. Why Don’t the Japanese?
Japan’s government wants cash-hoarding households to invest more
3 min
TOKYO—Japan’s government is on a mission to make buying stocks hot again.
Many of America’s biggest investors are bullish on Japan. Warren Buffett shared that he increased his investments in Japanese companies during an April visit to the country. Ken Griffin is preparing to reopen an office in Tokyo for his hedge fund, Citadel, and investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have issued optimistic outlooks for Japan’s stock market.
Japan’s problem is this: There are few signs its estimated 125 million residents share in the excitement.
Burned by dismal returns since the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble in the late 1980s and early 1990s, generations of families here have stashed most of their money in low-yielding savings accounts rather than trying to increase their wealth through the stock market.
Japanese households put an average of just 11% of their savings into stocks and 54% in cash and bank deposits, according to Bank of Japan data released last month. That trails well behind the U.S., where households have about 39% of their money tied up in the market and only 13% in cash and bank deposits, according to Federal Reserve data.
Haruyo Arai, a 62-year-old office worker, began investing in the stock market just last month.
“I was brought up by parents who would say, ‘Don’t dabble in stocks,’ ” she said.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has pledged to double households’ asset incomes, in part by encouraging people to invest in risky assets like stocks. The government is raising caps for Japan’s tax-exempt investment system for small investors, the Nippon Individual Savings Account, with changes set to take effect in January. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has been urging companies to boost their valuations and increase shareholder returns.
Arai cited the upcoming expansion to NISA, along with a desire to save more money for the future, as some of the reasons she decided to begin taking investing more seriously. She has been taking weekend classes at Tokyo-based Financial Academy to learn more about stocks and waking up early every morning to watch a TV news program focused on the economy.
Some believe investors like Arai will prove to be the exception, not the rule. Stocks here haven’t hit a record in decades. There isn’t much buzz among ordinary people about investing in Japanese markets.
“I’ve got the impression that Japanese people don’t really think positively about the desire to make money,” said Takashi Kawaguchi, a 48-year-old office worker who, like Arai, has been learning about investing at Financial Academy.
While the 2023 rally has helped lift Japanese stock indexes to 33-year highs, long-term returns pale in comparison to what an investor would have gotten by investing in U.S. stocks. The Nikkei closed at 32,402 on Friday, still 17% below its record hit in 1989. The S&P 500 has grown more than twelvefold over that time. That has made many investors here turn to foreign markets instead of focusing their bets within Japan.
“The Nikkei might hit 40,000, god knows when,” said Heihachiro “Hutch” Okamoto, foreign equity consultant at retail brokerage Monex. “But most of our investors prefer U.S. stocks.”
To Okamoto’s point, the most popular names traded on Monex daily aren’t Japanese stock indexes like the Topix or Nikkei, brand-name companies like Sony or even the “sogo shosha”—the trading houses that Buffett has invested in. Instead, they are all American names: companies like Nvidia, Tesla, Apple and Amazon.com, as well as funds tracking the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100.
And that is just among those interested in investing in the first place. While in past years, everyday investors in Japan made a name for themselves with their forays into the foreign exchange market, the overall trading culture here has been one of hesitation.
“Most people here think investing is very risky,” said Hidekazu Ishida, a special adviser at FinCity.Tokyo, which works with the government and the financial industry to try to boost investment in Tokyo. Being into finance comes off as “kakkowarui,” he added, referencing a word for uncool.
Even some heads of companies are lukewarm about the idea of encouraging more individual investors to buy Japanese stocks.
“I’m neutral about that,” said Takeshi Niinami, chief executive officer of whisky and beverage giant Suntory, when asked if he thought it would be a good idea for more Japanese people to invest in the market. Stock investing is risky, he said. And many Japanese people remain wary of participating in the market, because of the severity of prior downturns.
“I think perhaps increasing interest rates is better for people,” he said.
—Chieko Tsuneoka and Alastair Gale contributed to this article
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
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Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
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