‘Crack-addict stoozing’ or ‘stoozing on steriods’ is one way to describe the Carry Trade. It’s important at this point to realise that the carry trade knows no boundaries, and it seeps through literally millions of investments, from food to mortgages. What is the ‘Carry Trade’? Simply put it’s kind of like institutional stoozing (see previous post on stoozing). When you stooz you get a credit line of 0% or close to it (normally in the form of a credit card) you borrow all you can on it and put the money on deposit, when the 0% credit runs out you repay the loan and keep the deposit interest you earned. The same thing is being done with Japan, only in the billions, even trillions.
Institutions borrow money from the Bank of Japan at extremely low interest rates (at one point it was 0%!), typically below 1% and then they often leverage this money (borrow using it as collateral) up and invest in anything that might grow, in fact this practice had a lot to do with the worldwide credit crisis …