Tokyo: City of Your Deflationary Future?
"Because of the deflation that had been gnawing at prices since the mid-1990s, the crisp notes could acquire more goods the longer they remained in their frozen vault. If, for example, someone had stashed 100,000 Yen in the fridge in 1995, by 2012, its purchasing power would have risen to 112,000 Yen."
"Danish, Swiss and German government obligations all trade with negative yield through five-plus years (Swiss all the way to 10 years).""Nestle recently placed 500 million Euros of bonds that traded at negative yields – it is unclear if you get a Crunch bar to compensate you for your loss of principal on the investment."A total of $3 trillion of debt in Europe and Japan trades at a negative interest rate."
"All the formulas we learned in business school blow up. Good luck computing a dividend discount model [when the denominator is negative]...Obviously, growth could be pressured in a deflationary environment, but many businesses would retain absolute pricing power and have [theoretically] infinite value."