Apollo Global Management’s Marc Rowan knows the unhappy history of Japan Inc.’s three lost decades: Crumbling equity values. Deflation. The birth rate cratering and retiree population surging. Painful reckonings over and again for business and government.
But that’s the past, not the present.
“All of a sudden you have closer to 3% inflation. You have interest rates up for the first time, and that savings is going to be deployed productively,” Apollo’s chief executive officer said in an interview in Tokyo. “In Japan, they’re going through generational change and it’s generational change in corporate governance. It’s in interest rates, it’s in government policy.”