by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Turns out, collapse of the currency is the price Japan is now paying for years of crazed monetary policies.
Today, the yen dropped to ¥154.7 to the USD, a 34-year low, despite endless copy-and-paste jawboning by Japanese authorities and some market intervention – selling hard-earned dollars to buy back yen that the BOJ had created in such reckless abandon – to prop up the yen.
The yen has plunged by 32% against the USD since 2021 when other central banks started moving away from QE and 0% or negative policy rates; and it has collapsed by 50% since 2012 when newly elected prime minister Shinzo Abe implemented his economic policies (“Abenomics”) of fiscal profligacy funded by money printing, huge amounts of money printing that was reinforced in 2016 by the institution of Yield Curve Control, which kept the 10-year yield near 0%.