Tokyo and Washington carried out their first coordinated yen-buying intervention since 1998, spending roughly $59 billion to arrest the currency’s slide to a multi-decade low near 164 yen per dollar. The intervention briefly strengthened the yen to around 157 per dollar before it drifted back to 158-159, illustrating the difficulty of fighting structural currency trends with brute-force market operations. The yen’s weakness stems from the gap between elevated US interest rates maintained by the Federal Reserve and the more cautious rate hikes by the Bank of Japan. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the yen as « substantially undervalued. »
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