Norinchukin Bank, a 95-year-old bank that holds around $600 billion in deposits from Japan’s agricultural and fishing collectives, has amassed a significant share of the estimated $700 billion global market for collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs—complex investment vehicles that buy more than half of U.S. loans to junk-rated companies.
The privately held bank’s $62 billion CLO portfolio is larger than those of either of the two biggest U.S. bank buyers, Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. And its influence is growing: Norinchukin added about $10 billion to its holdings in the last three months of 2018, nearly a third of all U.S. and European CLO issuance over that period.
