Looking East

The Tokyo stock market, the Nikkei, is close to its level of 23 years ago. In the 80's, the Japanese economy was the talk of the world and the stock market reflected that until the real estate bubble in Japan sunk the economy. Japanese investors not only abandoned the stock market they abandoned spending regardless of how low the central bank lowered interest rates (they stopped at 0%), further hurting the economy. Although, the Japanese market is far from immune to the rest of the world, Japanese investors, large and small, are starting to buy stocks in numbers not seen in many years. Check out this article from today's NY Times.