Japan spends record ~53 billion USD to defend yen, US Treasury joins intervention for first time in over a decade
Japan spent an estimated $53B Thursday defending the yen, its largest single-day intervention on record, per Bloomberg. The US Treasury followed Friday with its own yen-buying operation, per the FT, the first joint US-Japan intervention in over a decade. The yen remains near 40-y
Japan spent an estimated $53 billion defending the yen on Thursday, the largest single-day currency intervention in the country's history, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Bank of Japan account data. The US Treasury followed on Friday with its own yen-buying operation, the Financial Times reports, marking the first time Washington has intervened alongside Tokyo to support the yen in more than a decade. According to the FT, the New York Federal Reserve sold euros to buy yen on the Treasury's behalf through Goldman Sachs $GS and Morgan Stanley $MS. A Reuters photo of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's notepad during a Camp David Cabinet meeting showed him contemplating additional US purchases of $5 billion to $10 billion worth of yen. The yen has been trading near 40-year lows against the dollar for months. A coordinated intervention of this scale suggests Washington now views the yen's decline as a risk to broader currency markets, not simply a problem for Tokyo to manage alone.