In Japan, people who are old enough to have lived it as adults still reminisce about the bubble that blew up in 1989 when the Nikkei almost hit 40,000 (now at 9,045) and when the already sky-high prices of real estate could only go up further. The slide from the top to reality today has been brutal, and a lot of people lost their shirts. A home changed from being an “investment” to being an “expense.” Stocks became toys for traders. And government bonds, because they kept their value though their coupons were practically imperceptible, became the place to go, and by golly, there suddenly were a lot of them, a veritable tsunami of JGBs that is still building momentum and will reach by the end of this fiscal year one quadrillion yen ($14 trillion), 240% of GDP. But there has been one investment, especially since 1999, that has worked out phenomenally well for the otherwise hapless Japanese investor: Gold.
And not because they've lost faith in it. - JO
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