When Tadashi Kikugawa arrived on the Japanese bond desk at Fuji Bank in 1988 after finishing a college degree in physics, he had to get to grips with a market with “huge” fluctuations. Trades worth $1 billion in one shot weren’t unusual, he says, and they would often send yields seesawing. Fast forward three decades and the market for Japanese government bonds -- JGBs -- is very different. Gone are the days of wild swings, and sometimes the market doesn’t move at all. On one Tuesday in March there wasn’t a single trade in the benchmark 10-year Japanese government bond. “That was very sad,” Kikugawa said in a recent ... (full story)