Podcast Transcripts

Japan Markets

Thinking sharp. Executing big. This is Savvy Giant.

Good morning. This is Tokyo Today, Japan Markets, for Saturday, November 14, 2026, published at 10:26 AM Japan time.

What is a six and a half percent week actually worth, when the man whose company justified most of it walked out of the building halfway through?

That is the question Tokyo carries into the weekend. Japanese equities just put together their best five sessions since June — the Nikkei added about six and a half percent, its biggest weekly gain in five months, and the broader TOPIX nearly matched it. And on Thursday evening New York time, Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive of Nvidia. The index went up. The reason it had been going up all year stopped being a certainty.

The sequence matters. Monday's rebound was close to three percent, and almost all of it came out of short books rather than conviction — people closing bets against the market, not placing bets on it. By Tuesday the Nikkei had taken back 61,000, and it did that on four semiconductor names, so the breadth underneath was thinner than the headline. Then came the resignation.

Friday was the whole week in miniature. The Nikkei ran more than seventeen hundred points higher at its best, kept about three hundred of them, and handed the rest back through the afternoon. Tokyo is closed for the weekend, and that is where it left things — a market holding semiconductors it was no longer sure it wanted to own for two days without a price.

Underneath the index, the week had a second story, and a far less nervous one.

All three megabanks reported, and all three were records. Mitsubishi UFJ posted a record first half, raised its full-year target and announced a buyback of up to two hundred billion yen. Mizuho lifted its annual forecast and doubled its buyback to four hundred billion. Sumitomo Mitsui raised its forecast and added a further two hundred and twenty billion to its own. Three lenders, three upgrades, roughly a trillion yen of repurchases in one afternoon — all pointing at the same cause, a domestic interest rate finally above zero.

Then two of those chief executives volunteered something nobody asked them. Sumitomo Mitsui's Toru Nakashima warned that a slowdown in data-centre investment could hit the Japanese economy and the bank's own results over the next six months, and said the bank has already tightened credit standards for data-centre lending. Mizuho's Masahiro Kihara flagged American restrictions on data-centre construction as a real tail risk.

Japanese banks are among the largest lenders into the global data-centre build. A credit officer tightening standards tells you something a share price cannot, because it is a decision rather than a reaction — and two of the big three made it in the week the market was buying chip stocks back.

The currency went the other way, twice. The dollar finished the week at 160 yen, having pushed through that level in two consecutive sessions — the first time beyond 160 since early September. The yen had its worst week against the dollar since mid-September, while the dollar itself hit a nineteen-month high.

Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said the moves had become, in her words, increasingly one-sided and rapid, and that the authorities would respond appropriately. Behind her sits the fifteen point four trillion yen the ministry actually spent defending the currency across July to September. The market is testing the level anyway, and the reason is arithmetic rather than nerve: the rate gap is widening from the American end, and nothing Tokyo says changes that.

Which brings us to the Bank of Japan. The policy rate sits at one point two five percent, and December is close to a consensus trade — market pricing puts a quarter-point hike at the mid-December meeting at roughly eighty-four percent, and the bank's own former chief economist expects one point five zero next month on the way to a two percent terminal rate.

Friday's data gave that another leg. A Reuters poll has Japan's core inflation at two point three percent for October, up from two point one in September — above target for a second straight month. And the ten-year government bond yield reached about two point eight six percent, its highest since the twenty-second of October. Normally a rising long end caps a Tokyo rally. This week it did not, because higher domestic yields are precisely what made those bank results work.

One more thing from the week, reported rather than traded. Japan's Finance Ministry has warned the country's major defence suppliers to prepare for cuts of up to fifty percent in planned purchases of missiles and aircraft, including American F-35 fighters. The ministry has proposed fifty to sixty trillion yen of defence spending across the five years from April 2027, against the eighty trillion some officials expected. The suppliers involved are Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

But the arithmetic is the government's own. The food consumption-tax cut leaves a four point three trillion yen hole every year, and defence is where the first squeeze shows. Japanese defence shares have re-rated for three years on the assumption the two-percent target was funded. This is the first official signal that the budget, not the ambition, binds.

So to the week ahead, which is dense. Japan's preliminary third-quarter GDP lands at 8:50 Monday morning. Consensus has growth slowing to an annualised zero point three percent, and the line to watch is private consumption, expected to have contracted for the first time in seven quarters. That is awkward for a central bank that intends to tighten in four weeks — it does not stop a December move, but it changes what the move is made into.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi leaves the same day for Manila and then Shenzhen, her first trip to China as prime minister, with relations at their worst in years, and a formal meeting with Xi Jinping looks unlikely. Japan's China-exposed cyclicals — machine tools, cosmetics, retail, inbound tourism — have spent a year pricing that freeze, and a trip that produces nothing keeps the discount where it is.

Then inflation on Friday morning. And a fortnight out, on the twenty-seventh, the TOPIX rebalance trade — index funds have to transact at that close, which makes it the session where the flow actually lands rather than the effective date three days later. On a Tokyo tape this concentrated, a day with forced buyers in the broad index is one of the very few mechanical bids left on the November calendar.

That's Tokyo Today's Japan Markets. Keep thinking sharp, and executing big.

Global

Tokyo Today — Global.

Gold had its worst week since March. The dollar had its best since September. Put those side by side and you have the only macro story that mattered.

Spot gold settled Friday just under three thousand eight hundred and eighty-five dollars an ounce, down four point seven percent on the week, while the dollar index rose one point one percent to a nineteen-month high. Gold falling that hard, in a week when the United States is at war in the Middle East and wholesale inflation is at a four-year high, is not a safety story. It is a cost-of-carry story — a market pricing a central bank that means to raise rates into an inflation problem rather than accommodate it.

October's producer price index rose zero point three percent on the month, slightly below expectations, but the annual rate hit six point five percent — the largest increase since November 2022. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman said rate hikes may be needed to slow the pace of price increases. Governor Christopher Waller said he would have backed hiking even if the inflation numbers had come in cooler. Futures pricing treats a December move as settled — roughly ninety percent on a quarter point, about ten on a half. The argument has stopped being whether and started being how much.

Equities took it well until Friday. The S&P 500 slipped about four tenths of a percent on the day, the Nasdaq nearly nine tenths, the Dow edged up a tenth — and all three still finished the week higher, the S&P around two and a half percent. A week that gains that much and loses its final session on technology is a week in which the index rose and the leadership did not.

Brent crude settled near ninety-six dollars a barrel, down more than two percent on the week. Crude in the mid-nineties is a drag on Japan's trade balance and a push upward on the inflation print the Bank of Japan is deciding against — which is why the cabinet put six hundred and fifty-two billion yen of winter energy subsidies onto the public ledger this week.

Then on Friday afternoon American time, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in the United States. The Transportation Secretary described a communications failure affecting all air route traffic control centres. More than eleven thousand departures were hit, and the FAA administrator told airline chief executives he could not say when it would be fixed. Homeland Security said there was no indication of a threat. It is the third nationwide ground stop on record. US-bound services from Japan Airlines and ANA were caught in it, and nearly five thousand American flights had been cancelled by Saturday morning Japan time.

One last contrast. Taiwan and Korea got the same news on Friday and closed in opposite directions. Taiwan's Taiex rose about one and a third percent, with local analysts arguing Nvidia's demand outlook is intact and a change at the top is unlikely to touch TSMC. Seoul's Kospi opened more than two percent higher and closed down about one, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix both lower. Same catalyst, opposite close — because Taiwan sells foundry capacity that gets booked whoever signs the order, and Korea sells memory, which reprices the moment anyone hesitates.

That's Global.

Tech

Tokyo Today — Tech.

Nvidia's board needs a chief executive, and according to the Financial Times, one person it has approached is the man who runs Arm.

Rene Haas is one of several candidates. Neither company has confirmed the approach, and there is no guarantee of an offer — but the report alone knocked six and a half percent off Arm's US-listed shares on Friday. Nvidia's board says it is still choosing a search firm and has not formally engaged anyone.

Haas is not a random name. He spent seven years at Nvidia, rising to run its computing-products business, joined Arm in 2013, and has led it since February 2022.

Here is why that lands in Tokyo. SoftBank Group is Arm's controlling shareholder, and Arm is the largest identifiable asset inside the Japanese holding company's value. SoftBank Group has spent this autumn being traded as a leveraged proxy for the entire AI buildout, and its shareholders now have to price a scenario where the chief executive of its best asset is recruited by its biggest customer's board.

Nvidia itself fell roughly twelve percent across the week and closed Friday below a four trillion dollar market value — a sixth consecutive weekly decline. HSBC cut it to hold, arguing it will drift until the board produces a permanent succession plan. The chief financial officer, Colette Kress, is running the company in the interim, and the quarterly results land around six in the morning Japan time on Wednesday. AMD sank about nine percent on Friday as the sector went with it.

For Japan's equipment makers — Advantest, Tokyo Electron, Disco, Screen, Lasertec — there is no domestic catalyst at all between Monday's open and that Wednesday print. Three sessions of pure positioning ahead of somebody else's numbers is about the least comfortable place a Tokyo semiconductor book can sit.

The part that actually reaches order books is the financing, and it is getting less attention than the succession. Nvidia held forty-eight billion dollars of stakes in two hundred and twenty-nine private companies as of July, and had offered a hundred and sixty-five billion in cloud backstops. Reporting this week says its five hundred billion dollar lending consortium is in flux, with at least one lender weighing an exit.

That is the mechanism linking a governance crisis to a Japanese factory. Equipment orders are placed against financed capacity, not enthusiasm. If the vendor financing that underwrote a large share of this buildout gets repriced, it shows up in Japan as a changed delivery schedule — a quarter or two after it shows up in the headlines.

Two quieter items. Square Enix nearly tripled its half-year profit, with sales up almost twenty-two percent. The engine was console games, where profit more than doubled on the wider release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. A publisher that spent a decade defending exclusivity windows just posted its cleanest half in years by putting its biggest game everywhere at once.

And OpenAI disbanded its standalone robotics team, folding the staff into research on the view that a general model can be pointed straight at a robot. Japan should read that twice: this country's automation franchise — Fanuc, Yaskawa, Keyence — is built on purpose-built control stacks, and the thesis being tested is that the control stack stops being defensible.

That's Tech.

Lifestyle

Tokyo Today — Lifestyle.

Eighty-six thousand people went to Tokushima this month, over two days, to a city that does not have a bullet train.

The event is Machi Asobi, an anime, games and streamer festival that takes over the centre of town, and attendees spend something like a hundred thousand yen each to be there. The streets fill with people in costume, and the town does the hosting rather than a convention centre on the outskirts. Regional Japan has spent two decades trying to buy visitors with infrastructure. Tokushima handed one audience the whole city instead.

In Hakodate on Friday, a box of seven apples sold for a hundred thousand yen — about six hundred and thirty dollars. Premium Nanamitsuki apples from the town of Nanae, and the top bid at the season's first auction matched last year's dearest batch almost exactly. The buyer said they had honey cores and were very good.

Sadaharu Oh, who holds the world record for career home runs, said on Friday that Shohei Ohtani should give up pitching and concentrate on hitting. Ohtani has managed knee and bicep trouble since July, and hit thirty home runs this season against fifty-four and fifty-five in his first two years with the Dodgers. Oh is the one person in Japanese baseball whose view cannot be waved away as impatience — he is telling the player who broke his frame of reference to pick one job.

And to finish. Ichiran — the tonkotsu chain whose whole identity is the single-person booth, the bamboo blind, the partition on either side so you cannot see your neighbour — has started selling you the booth.

It is called the Taste Concentration Counter Kit, and it assembles on your desk: blinds, partitions, the chain's signage, and a call button that genuinely chimes. It comes with the noodles, three thousand eight hundred and fifty yen for five servings, while stocks last, marking ten years of the company's instant range.

The booths exist, in Ichiran's own words, so a diner can concentrate solely on the taste of the noodles, free from the gaze of others. Which means somebody there looked at a person eating instant ramen alone at a desk, decided it was not private enough, and sold them a wall.

That's Lifestyle.

Scraps

Tokyo Today — Scraps. The things that did not quite make the main sections.

On the markets side. George Soros's fund lifted its Intel stake above three hundred and forty million dollars last quarter — conviction in the chipmaker almost nobody wanted. The US securities regulator has proposed scaling back executive pay disclosure, a loosening that arrives while Congress investigates a chief executive's outside dealings. The Supreme Court will hear a Robinhood challenge over an IPO disclosure lawsuit.

In the wider world. President Trump will press Southeast Asian nations to join his Pax Silica framework at the ASEAN summit in Manila — the same room the Japanese prime minister walks into on Monday. European leaders have been told, bluntly, to act now if they want to stay in the AI race. And BMW layoffs are producing blowback in China's industrial northeast, which is what a price war looks like when it reaches the foreign joint ventures' payrolls.

And in culture. Take-Two, which owns Grand Theft Auto, says it has no interest in selling itself after Electronic Arts went private for fifty-five billion dollars. The anime Minami-ke returns after fourteen years with its original cast. The Game Awards nominees arrive on the seventeenth, and Japanese studios go in off a strong year. And a life-size Gundam head goes on display in Osaka, where it is hoping to find a permanent home.

That's Scraps, and that's Tokyo Today for Saturday. We're back tomorrow.