对日本持续存在的过高特权的看法（英）

25-22Perspectives on Japan’sContinuing Exorbitant Privilege Kenneth Rogoff and Takeshi TashiroDecember 2025 ABSTRACT With renewed doubt about the scale, scope, and even the sign of the dollar’s“exorbitant privilege,” we revisit Japan’s case, in particular, the persistent excessreturn on its external balance sheet, which derives in part from its ability to issue Kenneth Rogoffis MauritsC. Boas Professor at Takeshi Tashirois anonresident seniorfellow at the Peterson JEL Codes:F30Keywords:Exorbitant Privilege, Return differentials, Safe assets Note:The authors are grateful to Greg Auclair, Olivier Blanchard, Kyoji Fukao,Joseph Gagnon, Keiichiro Kobayashi, Tetsuo Kurosaki, Adam Posen, Eiichi Tomiura,ÁngelUbide, and Nicolas Véron for extremely helpful comments and suggestions. INTRODUCTION: THE END OF EXORBITANT PRIVILEGE? Debate has resurfaced over whether the United States’ “exorbitant privilege” isfading. Coined by the former French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,the phrase captures how the United States is able to take advantage of globaldemand for US dollar bonds, including both public and private, to buy high- Yet the phenomenon is not uniquely American.1As Nievas and Sodano(2024) argue, a broader rich-world privilege persists—smaller in scale outside theUnited States, but present nonetheless. Across advanced and emerging marketeconomies, reserves are substantial and held chiefly in US dollars—often on theorder of three-fifths—alongside the euro, the yen, and other major currencies.Japan, in particular, has long benefited from very low interest rates and—following Rogoff and Tashiro (2015)—has enjoyed its own version of exorbitantprivilege, even though the yen ranks far below the dollar and the euro as areserve currency. Nevertheless, in practice, three elements go together in Japan’scase. First, its external balance sheet tends to earn a positive income differential JAPAN IS NO LONGER THE WORLD’S LARGEST NET CREDITOR Japan’s net international investment position (NIIP) reached a record 533trillion yen (about US$3.4 trillion) in 2024. Yet Germany has overtaken Japanas the world’s largest net creditor, with a NIIP of roughly 569 trillion yen 1Recent work for the United States (e.g., Tabova and Warnock 2025) emphasizes portfolio-level changes, geometric- vs. arithmetic-mean returns, and security-level measurement ofexpected returns. Our setting differs on all three: Our core results hinge on the bond incomecomponent rather than equity-heavy portfolio dynamics; for income-only (valuation-excluded)yields the geometric mean is very close to the arithmetic mean, so conclusions are insensitiveto this choice; and Japan’s primary income data are recorded on an accrual basis as reported NIIP, the United States has historically earned positive excess returns on itsexternal balance sheet. Gourinchas and Rey (2007) document this for the UnitedStates, while Rogoff and Tashiro (2015) analyze Japan’s case in the contextof its decades-long status as the world’s largest net creditor. Building on that JAPAN’S EXTERNAL POSITION: LARGER—AND MORE EXPOSED TOEXCHANGE RATE EFFECT AND MARKET RISK Over the decade since our previous paper, Japan’s external position has changedmarkedly. The economy has become more deeply integrated into global markets.An emblematic step was Japan’s leadership in ratifying the Comprehensive andProgressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). As integrationhas advanced, Japanese corporations have increased outward investment. Atthe household level, a pronounced home bias remains—most assets are yen- In recent years the change has been most visible in scale. While domesticoutput has grown only modestly, Japan’s NIIP has continued to rise andnow stands at roughly 80 percent of GDP. The depreciation of the yen hasmechanically boosted the yen value of foreign currency assets and thus three decades ago, when Japan became the world’s largest net creditor. At thattime, about half of external assets were classified as other investment, and directinvestment accounted for only around one-tenth. The newer mix—heavier in This shift reflects both shocks and structural adjustment: the sharp exportdecline during the 2008–09 global financial crisis; supply chain disruptions fromthe Great East Japan Earthquake and the 2011 floods in Southeast Asia; the A second manifestation is the exchange rate (FX) effect. Between 1995and 2024, Japan’s NIIP rose by far more in yen than in US dollars as the yendepreciated. Given Japan’s currency mix—external assets predominantly inforeign currency, liabilities predominantly in yen—a weaker yen mechanicallyboosts the value of assets relative to liabilities, raising the NIIP-to-GDP ratio inyen terms and heightening FX sensitivity. In US dollar terms, these valuation EXORBITANT PRIVILEGE: RETURN DIFFERENTIALS 1997–2014 (the scope of our previous paper), and it declines to roughly 0.8percentage points when extended through 2024. The excess retur