Bloomberg (link is gated) carry a report with comments from Eisuke Sakakibara, who was Japan’s vice finance minister from 1997-1999 and thus directed multiple rounds of yen FX intervention. He was gvien the nickname Mr Yen.
Sakakibara is now a professor at Tokyo’s Aoyama Gakuin University. He spoke in an interview on Bloomberg TV:
- “Market expectation is that toward the end of the year, it will go between 140 and 150 -- so it is quite possible that the yen would reach that level,”
The report goes on:
- The yen’s plunge has sparked verbal intervention by Japanese officials to talk up the currency, though that has done little to effectively halt its slide. It is unlikely that the authorities will intervene on a bigger scale because there’s still a reasonable explanation for the currency’s weakness, Sakakibara said.
- “This has happened because of the difference of the monetary policy,” he said. “I don’t think that neither the Bank of Japan or Japanese government are worried about the current state of affairs with regards to the exchange rate.”
