The Japanese central bank arrived in zero effective interest rates in the 90s, and has been practicing negative effective rates (I.E. smaller than inflation) for a while.

That had the effect that their banks took huge amounts of government loans and used it to buy foreign assets. As returns are higher in countries with higher interest rates, and lots of assets are practically safe, like government bonds, that is close to free money for them, and a very cheap loan to the receiving country.

But last year their central bank made the interest rate positive. And investors are acting on the expected way, selling the foreign assets and paying off their government. The article is claiming that this is the cause of the recent turbulence in the investment markets.

Thanks, that was generally how I interpreted the article.

The issue was the terms. There was a lot of logic inversion that someone who's much more familiar with the terms could probably follow, especially when trying to understand how an investment in Microsoft was loosing value when the investment was from a loan in yen.

Likewise, the end of the article uses a lot of abbreviations, especially when referring to Australian currency, which I just don't understand at all.