Japanese investors are buying gold to store in Switzerland because of negative interest rates and fears the yen might depreciate as the government grapples with the heaviest public debt burden in the developed world, according to BullionVault Ltd, an online trading and storage company.
The number of buyers jumped 62 percent in the first six months from the second half of last year, said Atsuko Sato Whitehouse, head of Japanese markets at the London-based investment service. She did not provide details.
The Bank of Japan has embarked on unprecedented bond buying to bolster the economy, prompting speculation the yen could plunge if stimulus efforts fail.
“Many of our Japanese customers think it’s too risky to hold gold at home and they want to keep them in Switzerland because they are anxious about the future of Japan,” Whitehouse said in an interview.
The country’s growth has stagnated for a decade, defying fiscal and monetary stimulus which has driven up public debt to more than double the value of annual economic output.
Global investors have piled into gold this year as market turbulence and low or negative interest rates increase the appeal of bullion. Prices soared about 30 percent to the highest in more than two years as assets in exchange-traded funds jumped 37 percent to more than 2,000 tonnes. The stampede increased after the UK voted to leave the EU on June 23.
Bullion is probably in the early stages of its next bull run, according to UBS Group AG.
Rather than weakening, the yen has climbed in the past year because investors see it as a haven along with government bonds, silver and gold.
That has meant the price of the metal in yen has dropped 2.5 percent over that time, even as bullion denominated in US dollars has strengthened 17 percent to US$1,357.54 an ounce.
The surging yen has not stopped some commentators from predicting a collapse.
Yukio Noguchi, a university professor and former Japanese Ministry of Finance official whose business books are best sellers, envisages a scenario in which a failure of the country’s economic stimulus could drive the yen to weaken beyond ￥300 per US$1. That compared with about ￥101 yesterday.
The Japanese investors attracted by BullionVault range from wealthy older businessmen who have experience working abroad and want to shelter their assets, to younger people and women seeking a haven because of increasing global economic and political risks, especially after the British vote to leave the EU, Whitehouse said.
BullionVault sees similarities between the behavior of Japanese investors and their overseas peers, Whitehouse said.
Most of its US customers keep bullion abroad because they fret about the risk of confiscation, which happened during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Half of its British clients store their gold overseas, she said.
The company said on its Web site that it is the largest online investment gold service in the world.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS