JPY Rises After Abe Comments on Weak Yen

The yen rose on Wednesday after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe voiced concern about the economic impact of its fall to a six-year low, adding to the sense of a halt this week in the dollar’s record-breaking run since July.

 
The dollar slipped 0.3 percent on the day to 108.55 yen after the Jiji news service quoted Abe as saying he would carefully watch the impact of the yen’s recent weakness on Japanese regional economies.

The prime minister’s comments follow similar expressions of concerns from two of his ministers after a drop of roughly 7 percent since early August which took the yen to a low of 109.46 yen per dollar last Friday.

Much as that seems broadly part of Abe’s plan to refloat the Japanese economy by spurring inflation, market players said the pace may not be so easy for policy makers to digest.

“It seems to us – and I think most people – that it’s not the fact of the move, just the pace of it that Tokyo is concerned about,” said a spot dealer with one large international bank in London.

“(But) it is not a surprise that we’re seeing the yen show some resistance at the moment, given the slight pullback we’ve seen on the dollar in the last few days.”

via Reuters

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza