美日联手干预日元：贝森特的宏观交易工具箱

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. [music] We're watching the yen quite closely. Obviously, it's not gotten a huge game.

The yen continued its recent slide on Monday and that's in spite of a rare joint effort by the US and Japan late last month to [music] try to strengthen it.

We are currently at one is that 158 on dollar yen. So the yen has given up half of the gains that it made [music] since that intervention. And

the US stepped in to prop up the Japanese currency for the first time since [music] 1998. And that caught investors and central bankers by surprise. The intervention was spearheaded by US Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, who cut [music] his teeth as a macro trader working at hedge funds before he started his current job effectively running the world's largest economy. For Besson, propping up the yen is more than the US helping an ally.

It's also something that could head off market moves that could result in higher interest rates in the United States.

The last thing he [music] wants is to see, you know, US mortgage rates going even f higher.

Chris Anie is a senior editor on Bloomberg's global economy team and he points out Japan is the largest foreign holder of US treasuries. Chris says that if Japan wants to prop up its own currency by buying yen, the dollars it needs to do so could come from selling some of its US debt.

The biggest foreign holder of treasuries dumping a bunch of their holdings. That's going to put pressure on 10-year treasuries, 30-year treasuries, and the 30-year fixed rate mortgage.

Bessant's intervention may not be one and done. The Treasury Secretary recently asked the Federal Reserve to make a policy change that would let Japan borrow more dollars against its Treasury holdings without having to sell them. Previous Treasury secretaries were reluctant to intervene in currency markets and investors are wondering how far Bessant is [music] willing to go.

At the end of the day, you're sort of playing with the good faith and credit of the United States government. [music]

Bloomberg's Dan Flattley covers the Treasury Department. You know, the Treasury Secretary is not supposed to act as a hedge fund manager. The Treasury Secretary is supposed to act as the chief financial steward of the United States economy. So, you know, there are enormous stakes here. And so, all's well that goes well until until things [clears throat] go off the rails. Things are going fine now, seem to be, but that's not to say that is indefinite.

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I'm David Gera and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Scott Bessant's interventions in global currency markets. What impact are they having and what's the endgame? [music] All right, let me let me set the table here with you, Chris, to start. Um, over the last half decade or so, Japanese yen has weakened against [music] the dollar. 5 years ago, a dollar would buy you say 100 110 yen. For the last half year or so, a dollar gets you more than 150 yen.

For starters, what what is wrong with a weak yen? Why does Japan want a stronger currency? [music]

Well, it wants a stronger currency because uh it has been flirting with the weakest levels in four decades. And at a time of elevated energy cost, right, they have to use a lot more yen to buy imported oil, fertilizer, all kinds of commodities. And the prices of those have already been rising, right? But it's it's rising even more in yen terms. So, Japanese households uh and companies have seen their purchasing power really demolished and Japan's interest rates have been coming up a little bit over the past couple of years, but they are still very very low, you know, around 1% and their inflation is at least double that.

So their real interest rates are negative and that is imparting massive pressure all the time on the yen. Obviously American interest rates much higher closer to 4% and if the bank of Japan continues to be a lagard in uh raising interest rates and you know you're not going to see intervention really having a lasting effect. So you have Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, kind of surveilling the global economy, paying close attention to to Japan.

What do we know of why he decided it was it was wise for the US to intervene? At this point,

there's a couple of things going on here. There's a geopolitical dimension to this which is essentially sending a signal to the world that if you're a close US ally, you are not only the beneficiary of potentially good trade agreements, defense agreements, other types of policy uh benefits, but you also have available to you the might of the dollar and and the US financial system to come to your rescue should you run into problems.

And so I think that there's also sort of the the exigencies of the job when it comes to defending the dollar's uh global role. So um one of the things that Bessant appears to have been contemplating was the fact that if Japan needed to defend the yen, it would have to sell US treasuries. One of the fears is that if Japan were to sell a substantial portion of its holdings, that could lead to a rise in yields here in the United States, which would put upward pressure on things like mortgages and and other things that are already sort of under upward pressure and and that's leading to obviously domestically a lot of questions about affordability and other things like that.

So, I think that's his primary concern there.

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Now we don't have perfect um visibility into his thinking around this and he has said very little about the specifics of this operation but basically what he has said is that Japan's economy is in much stronger shape than the market sometimes gives it credit for and that technically the word is disorderly that US and Japanese officials stepped in to prevent disorderly selling in the market

and Chris notably in this intervention the US didn't sell dollars to buy yen. It sold euros to defend the yen. Why was that?

You know, as Dan said, the Treasury hasn't spelled out exactly what it did here and why, but the Euroyen cross is not very liquid, right? If you think about the $9.5 trillion a day foreign exchange market, right? The number one currency pair is Euro dollar. Number two, Dollar Yen. Euryen isn't on the top 10 there. it's very very illquid. But if a market is illquid, that means you can have a big price impact, right?

Uh with a relatively small amount. And if you're using billions of dollars, I can imagine that the impact is going to be pronounced. So part of it might have been he didn't want to sell dollars, put pressure on the dollar, potentially put pressure on treasuries, send uh long-term US interest rates up. Chris, all of this makes me curious about this move more broadly. When when you look at the pantheon of Treasury Secretaries, um what's kept them from making these kinds of interventions?

Well, the principle that US Treasury secretaries have embraced for many decades is one of freely set exchange rates, market set exchange rates. and they generally don't like the idea of manipulation and going into the market. We saw in the Asian financial crisis a bunch of Asian economies you know were maintaining currency pegs that didn't suit their fundamentals and then when they broke all of a sudden there was a massive crisis.

So this philosophy of embracing hands off, let the market do what it's going to do with currencies is deeply ingrained uh in the US Treasury.

Dan, I want to turn to you on I'm I'm hoping you can explain the way that that the experience he had doing macro trading kind of could influence his perspective on on the work he's doing now in Treasury when it comes to the yen. Yeah, I mean he looks across the whole world obviously both as a public official and in his private career as a hedge fund manager, but uh Japan is has a special place in his heart. I think it's fair to say, you know, we're trying to tally up how many times h

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