2026-01-14 09:30:00
Mimura is out saying that:
- Recently seeing one-sided rapid moves in the market
- Extremely concerned about forex moves
- Will take appropriate action against excessive moves, not ruling out any options
- Don’t see any economic fundamentals that back recent moves in the Japanese yen
- Volatility is the biggest problem
- Both a strong yen and weak yen have their respective merits and demerits
- Hearing demerits of a weak yen on import costs through various channels
USD/JPY drops a little to 158.67 on the comments here but is back up to be around 158.80 at the moment, down 0.2% on the day. Amid the barrage of verbal intervention from Tokyo officials during the session, the pair has dropped off from about 159.20 levels at the start of the session at least.
In case you missed it, Japan finance minister Katayama even made an oddly specific comment about the price movement in the currency here. He specifically singled out the drop in the yen during last Friday on 9 January as being not in line with “fundamentals”.
As argued in the linked post, it’s definitely an interesting one whichever way you want to look at it. The odds of intervention now look to be rising just as USD/JPY feels an inevitable pull to probe the 160.00 mark earlier today.
