"...a quadrillion here, a quadrillion there... and pretty soon you're talking real money!"
For the first time in history, foreign assets held by Japanese institutional and individual investors appear to have topped 1,000 trillion yen ($8.79 trillion), according to Nikkei estimates.
The amount has increased roughly 50% during the past five years and now is more than twice as much as the country's gross domestic product.
Japanese investors are in the midst of a major shift -- pulling their cash out of domestic securities and placing it in overseas markets.
Securities seem to have accounted for nearly half of the 1,000 trillion yen that has escaped overseas. Japanese investors were holding 453 trillion yen worth at the end of June, up 100 trillion yen or so over the past three years.
By investment destination, nearly half of securities investments were directed to the U.S., while close to 30% went to Europe.
They have been pushed to this collective decision by a hyper-aggressive Bank of Japan, which for more than four years now has been flooding the country's economy with so much yen that cash instruments can only earn negligible interest.
And given Shinzo Abe's recent super-majority election win... do not expect this flood of liquidity - fungibly leaking out to the rest of the world's assets - to stop anytime soon!
Just ask Kuroda...