Jason Douglas

Investors are still anxious about inflation.

Investors are still anxious about government spending right across the world.

But...

It is true that Japanese investors have been big players in bond markets, especially the US Treasury market, for really quite a long time and have had some effect in keeping interest rates down in the US and in other places.

And so if we do see Japanese investors start to repatriate more of their money, that is just one other reason why we might start to see slightly higher interest rates, slightly higher borrowing costs.

in the US and around the world.

It's worth bearing in mind none of this is going to happen quickly.

I mean, this will be a process that will probably play out over a couple of years.

As we mentioned earlier, the Bank of Japan is raising rates very slowly.

But we spoke to analysts at HSBC, for instance.

They were talking about how if rates got up to 1% or even 2% in Japan over the next few years, then we would really see a perceptible effect on global borrowing costs that we could attribute to Japanese investors' behavior.

Having said all that, the Japanese economy, it's not doing great.

I think there's still a bit of anxiety about growth.

There's a bit of anxiety about things like wages and so on.

And so some economists also think that maybe we won't see too many more rate rises by the Bank of Japan.

So we'll see how things go on the growth front.

My pleasure.

Thank you, Luke.

So Chinese military activity close to its neighbors in Asia is clearly not something that's new.

These joint patrols of Russian bombers, though near to Korea and Japan, are certainly notable for a couple of reasons.