Welcome to money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host David Stein. Today is episode 468. It's titled, Lessons from Japan's 34-year

stock bear market. Last week, the Nique 225 index in Japan broke through its peak after 34 years.

It reached its high in December 1989.

And since then, the price return of the index

has been essentially zero.

There have been some dividends over that 34 year period through the end of January, the

MSCI, Japan Index, returned 1.1% annualized.

All that return was from dividends. We can compare that to the U.S. stock market

which returned 9.6 percent annualized over that same 34-year period.

Bruce Kirk, who is chief Japan equity strategist at Goldman Sachs,

says it's an incredibly important barrier for Japan to have finally broken through.

For the last 30 plus years, Japan has been persistently framed in relation to that December 1989 bubble era Nike,

all-time high.

No matter how well it is done since the market

finally bottomed, their narrative has always been tempered with an element of

skepticism that references the high watermark.

If we look at Japan back in 1989, the stock market made up 37.5% of global stock market capitalization.

But by the end of 2022 it was 6.3%.

Compare that the US now makes up 58% of the global stock market. There are some things that we can learn from this 34

year, we'll call it a bare market, but a bare market is an extended down period and the Japanese stock market is definitely an uptrend.

It's up 17.5% this year alone.

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