Smart money is already sniffing other openings

Watched TV the other night, Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey swapping jokes about anal fissures.

Baldwin the guy feted in Vanity Fair for his political ambitions. A sitcom doofus.

The first sentence in Neuromancer, William Gibson's debut novel published in 1984, reads: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

The author predicted cyberspace and YouTube when we were all still bashing Olivettis. And we end up with gags on prime-time TV about bleeding bottoms.

He got the sense of hissing witlessness right, except now it's not in the sky - it's in our lounges, on the wall.

Gibson's new book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, contains essays on this and that, including his favourite subject, Japan.

Japan should concern us all, the high-strung bourgeoisie, tense and nervous about new highs on the JSE and a bond market that will not lie down and die.

Going by the suburban mood, our investment accounts should be gutted. Instead, we couldn't be more flush - and you might as well add a grand to your kitty every time another analyst predicts doomsday. They've been doing it for a while, so backdate those deposits.

Japan's retail investors - embodied in the form of "Mrs Watanabe" - know a good thing when they see it. The Bank of Japan estimates the investable assets of Japanese households at $18-trillion.

Despite a domestic market that has entered its third decade of recession, or outright deflation, all those boom-time yen have not evaporated - they've just been farmed offshore.

William Gibson, if he turned his mind to high finance, would love uridashi.

These unique Japanese instruments, denominated in foreign currencies, are custom-made for Mrs Watanabe, hunting returns outside her negative-yielding home country.

On Friday the International Financing Review, quoting research by JP Morgan, noted two major moves by uridashi:

"They have increasingly migrated to high-yield emerging-market currencies and are reaching further down the credit curve for incremental yield pick-up".

In English: Japanese investors are tapping "exotic" stuff like Brazilian real, Mexican pesos and South African rand - and they're buying longer-dated bonds in those currencies because the returns are rich.

Zerohedge, among many clever websites, reckons the US and Europe will follow Japan down the recessionary cliff. Already, they say, the smart money is sniffing other openings. Guess whose?

So say pooh to the bad-news bears. William Gibson (and Mrs Watanabe) suggest:

"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."