The Music Just Stopped: Japan Banking Giant Norinchukin To Liquidate $63 Billion In Treasuries

The Music Just Stopped: Japan Banking Giant Norinchukin To Liquidate $63 Billion In Treasuries & European Bonds To Plug Massive Unrealized Losses

TYLER DURDEN

Last October, when the wounds from the March 2023 bank failures - which surpassed the global financial crisis in total assets and which sparked the latest Fed intervention, setting the market's nadir over the past 16 months - were still fresh, we made a non-consensus prediction: we said that since the Fed has once again backstopped the US financial system, "the next bank failure will be in Japan."

This prediction only got warmer two months later when, inexplicably, Japan's Norinchukin bank, best known as Japan's CLO whale, was quietly added to the list of counterparties for the Fed's Standing Repo Facility, a/k/a the Fed's foreign bank bailout slush fund.

But if that was the first, and still distant, sign that something was very wrong at one of Japan's biggest banks (Norinchukin is Japan's 5th largest bank with $840 billion in assets) today the proverbial canary stepped on a neutron bomb inside the Japanese coalmine, because according to Nikkei, Norinchukin Bank "will sell more than 10 trillion yen ($63 billion) of its holdings of U.S. and European government bonds during the year ending March 2025 as it aims to stem its losses from bets on low-yield foreign bonds, a main cause of its deteriorating balance sheet, and lower the risks associated with holding foreign government bonds."

See, what's happened in Japan is not that different from what is happening in the US, where as the FDIC keeps reminding us quarter after quarter, US banks are still sitting on over half a trillion dollars in unrealized losses, as a result of the huge jump in interest rates which has blown up the banks' long-duration fixed income holdings, sending them trading far below par and forcing banks (and the Fed, see BTFP) to come up with creative ways of shoving these massive losses under the rug.

Needless to say, but the Nikkei does so anyway, "Massive sales by Norinchukin could have a sizable effect on the U.S. bond market."

And since we now know what is happening, it is only a matter of time before everyone else frontruns Norinchukin.

What happens next will be even uglier: since the bank will no longer be able to mask its fixed income losses under the guise of accounting sleight of hand, the bank's financial results for the period ending March 2025 will "deteriorate significantly as a result of the huge divestment of foreign bonds and turn paper losses into real ones." As of May, Norinchukin put its final loss at more than 500 billion yen, but this is now expected to reach the 1.5 trillion yen level.

According to the Nikkei, Norinchukin Bank is considering raising 1.2 trillion yen to shore up its finances. It has already started discussions with Japan Agriculture Cooperatives, one of its main investors, and others. Of course, the question of who in their right mind would lend the bank good money to plug an even bigger hole that is about to open up, is anyone's guess.

But that won't stop the bank from doing what it has to, now that it has picked the liquidation route: and once the selling flood begins, it won't end as these flashing red headlines from Bloomberg just confirmed:

• *NORINCHUKIN TO SELL US, EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN BONDS GRADUALLY
• *NORINCHUKIN ALSO WEIGHS LOCAL, OVERSEAS BONDS, PROJECT FINANCE
• *NORINCHUKIN EYES ASSETS INCLUDING CLOS, STOCKS AFTER BOND LOSS

There's a name for this: a firesale, but - drumroll - a "gradual" one, because that's how firesales supposedly go in Japan.

Luckily, the one thing nobody has to guess, is what happens next: as the wonderful movie Margin Call laid out so very well, once you realize that the music has stopped, you have three choices: i) be first, ii) be smarter, or iii) cheat. In the case of Japan's Norinchukin, it has decided the time has come to liquidate before everyone else. We wonder how "everyone else" will take this particular news...