Source: Wall Street News
While the Japanese government has ample foreign exchange reserves to support the yen exchange rate on its own, the cost of intervening FX markets is also high without the Fed's interest rate cut support.
The yen has fallen sharply in recent weeks, with the US dollar quickly breaching 152 and 155, two psychological barriers considered likely to intervene by Japan's Ministry of Finance, falling even slightly below 160 on Monday, refreshing the record low since April 1990. Subsequently, the yen bounced back strongly, recovering from 155 to 155.33 now, prompting market speculation that Japanese authorities may have intervened.
In the face of the dangerous yen, how will the Japanese authorities act? In a recent report released by the HSBC FX analyst Joey Chew, the Japanese government, revisited the history of the Japanese government's regular pre-exchange market and pointed out that while the Japanese government has ample FX reserves to support its own move to support the yen exchange rate, the cost of intervening in the foreign exchange market is also high without the Fed's interest rate cut support.
If the Fed does not cut interest rates, intervention policy will also suffer
First, HSBC points out that from past experience, the impact of Japan's separate intervention on the exchange market is far less than that of joint US-Japan action:
Coordination tends to be more effective than separate intervention, for example, the total dollar sold by Japan and the United States on June 17, 1998 was only $25 billion, but the impact on the USD/JPY (the difference between the highs and lows on the plate was 6%) than the first two times when Japan acted alone...