Boxing Day 2022 will mark a decade since the return to power of Shinzo Abe and the start of a run that would go on to make him Japan’s longest serving prime minister.
The late leader’s “Abenomics” economic revival programme, along with the extreme quantitative easing regime that the Bank of Japan imposed from 2013, were supposed to stimulate corporate investment, encourage focus on shareholders, raise wages and generally redeploy the mountains of cash held by the country’s huge cohort of listed companies. For a time, investors loved and bought the story.
Ten years later, the balance sheets of Japan Inc are stubbornly replete with cash and suggest that the corporate instinct to hoard (for better or worse) may never be overcome.