Japan Mega-Pension Fund Dives into Stocks, Foreign Assets, Loses Shirt. People Not Amused, by Wolf Richter

The Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund is an extreme case, losing  almost 4 percent of its assets in quarter ended June 30, but many pensions funds around the world are either losing money or not generating the returns that will be necessary to pay beneficiaries. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

“It will not harm the pension beneficiaries”: official

This is how the report by Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) for the March-June quarter – the first quarter in Japan’s fiscal year – started out in order to soothe the frazzled nerves of the people who’d paid into this system all their working lives: the fund is managed “in the long-term, and its investment results should be assessed in the same manner.”

OK we get that. But what a fiasco.

The GPIF isn’t alone. Pension funds in the US and elsewhere are in deep trouble. Many of them have been taking on enormous risks to solve their underfunding problems. It has been called the “global pension crisis.” Some corporate and union pension funds in the US have already become insolvent. Others are heading that way. Local and state pension funds are neck-deep in trouble. Yet, the Fed-engineered asset bubbles have lifted all boats….

But few big public pension funds can hold a candle to the GPIF’s October 2014 decision to dive into Japanese stocks and foreign stocks and bonds near the peak of the Japanese stock market rally.

Actually, it didn’t voluntarily dive into it.

It was pushed into it by the Abenomics-obsessed government and its reckless way of trying to manipulate up the stock market. The goal was to plow 20% to 25% of the fund’s assets into Japanese stocks. At the time, the fund still had about $1.4 trillion in assets, so 25% would amount to about $350 billion. It meant some serious buying over a year or two, which would inflate the stock market.

Add some hype and hedge-fund front-running, peppered with the Bank of Japan’s money-printing mania, which includes purchases of equity ETFs – and you’ve got a value-creation miracle on your hands.

It did work for a while. It worked during the hype stage. And it worked when the GPIF began selling its government bonds to the Bank of Japan and started buying stocks. The GPIF became the biggest buyer of equities in Japan. Stocks soared. Other pension funds followed the model. In June 2015, the Nikkei hit its recent peak of 20,868 (still 47% below its all-time peak in 1989).

But since then, the GPIF has met the goals for its “policy asset mix.” And so the GPIF stopped its purchases. Hedge funds lost interest and bailed out. And the Nikkei has since plunged 22%!

And there’s a special treat. Foreign equities and foreign bonds combined account for over 34% of total assets: a huge bet on the exchange rate, or rather on the wholesale destruction of the yen. But the yen has risen sharply recently.

So how has the Abenomics value-creation miracle performed?

•  In Q1 of fiscal 2016, ending June 30, the GPIF lost ¥5.23 trillion ($51.4 billion), or 3.9% of its total assets.
•  Year-over-year, total assets have shrunk 8.1% to ¥129.7 trillion.
•  In Q4 of fiscal 2015, ended March 31, the fund had already lost 3.5%, or ¥4.7 trillion ($46.2 billion).
•  This was the first back-to-back quarterly loss since 2008! But we’re not in a Financial Crisis!
•  Both quarters combined generated a loss of about 7% or ¥10 trillion ($98 billion)!
•  For the fiscal year 2015, the fund lost ¥5.24 trillion, the fund’s first annual loss since 2008.

To continue reading: Japan Mega-Pension Fund Dives into Stocks, Foreign Assets, Loses Shirt. People Not Amused