Geoff Yu, senior strategist at Bank of New York Mellon, created the Katsu Curry Index, a new indicator based on the price of pork-curry-rice from the CoCo Ichibanya chain to assess yen weakness. According to his calculations, the dollar should exchange for 62.18 yen when accounting for real purchasing power, while it was worth approximately 159.05 yen on the foreign exchange market on Wednesday. This index suggests the yen is significantly undervalued compared to the Big Mac Index, which indicates a theoretical rate of 80.30 yen per dollar. The yen, which saw the most dramatic intervention in fifteen years to support it against the dollar, has since given back half its gains. CoCo Ichibanya, the chain used for this index, has approximately 1,500 restaurants worldwide.
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