美国财政部动用欧元干预日元汇率，市场震惊

Last month, the United States Treasury bought an ungodly sum of Japanese yen in the first forex operation of its [music] kind since 1998. What's more, Washington didn't sell dollars to do it. It sold euros [music] and then it told the Europeans afterwards. For decades, the working assumption in our entire system was that the world's reserve issuer does not manage its own exchange rate and it certainly doesn't reach into somebody else's currency to do it.

That assumption died in a single Friday session. So today we're looking at exactly what happened on the 31st of July. [music] Why Japan didn't have the means to defend its own currency alone. And why gold has been pricing in the implications of all this while Bitcoin has yet to catch up. My name is Lewis and this is the Coin [music] Bureau. Now let's start with exactly what happened during that pivotal week in late July.

On the 29th of July, dollar yen printed 163.39. That's a 40-year low for the Japanese currency, and short yen positioning was sitting near 5-year highs to boot. On Thursday, the 30th, Japan went into the markets alone to bolster its currency. Estimates from money broker data put that single session somewhere between 52 billion and 59 billion, potentially the largest 1-day currency intervention in Japanese history. It moved the price, but it did not hold.

Then on Friday the 31st, the Americans showed up. The operation was executed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on behalf of the Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund or ESF with the trades placed through primary dealers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In other words, the big boys stepped in. And we know roughly how big the American side was because of, believe it or not, a photograph. At the cabinet meeting at Camp David at 11:33 in the morning, a router's photographer got a clean shot of Treasury Secretary Scott Besson's notepad.

It read to do by Japanese yen 5 to 10 bill. Very discreet. And by Sunday's close, dollar yen was at 156.55. A drop of roughly 5% in just two sessions. Public confirmation came on Monday the 3rd of August when Japan's finance minister Satsuki Katyama acknowledged the joint operation. She referred to the September 2025 US Japan finance minister's joint statement as the framework it was executed under. Now we'll come back to the euro side of this.

But first let's look at what the market did next. By the 7th of August dollar yen was back at 157.76. As I record this, it's a smidge under 159. So, roughly half of the largest coronated yen operation in nearly three decades was handed back within a week or so. Seems like the market is not totally convinced yet. And on that note, you might be wondering why Japan needs Washington in the room at all. Well, on paper, Japan has the tools.

The Bank of Japan hiked its policy rate to 1.0% in June, the highest level in about three decades. then held in July while warning that inflation could run above target. Rates went up and the yen collapsed anyway. And the reason for that is found in the bond market. The 10-year Japanese government bond has been trading near 2.80% after peaking around 2.90%. And the 30-year has been sitting in a 3.87% to 3.97% range. For a country carrying Japan's debt load, those are serious, serious numbers.

Every additional hike the BOJ delivers to defend the currency compounds the government's own interest bill. So, the central bank is boxed in. Raise rates enough to save the yen, and you threaten the solveny of the country, which leaves market intervention, but that intervention needs dollars. Now, Japan has dollars in the sense that it holds approximately $1.2 2 trillion in US treasuries, making it the largest foreign holder of American government debt on the planet.

The obvious move is to sell some of them. But that's exactly what Washington can't allow. Think of it like this. If you need cash urgently and you own a house, you have two options. You could sell the house or you could borrow against it. Selling is cleaner for you, but it's bad for your neighbors because the price you accept becomes everyone else's valuation. That's what a Japanese Treasury liquidation would do to the long end of the US bond market with the 10-year already sitting at 4.65%.

So, the market intervention solution is a bit like the borrowing option. The Federal Reserve's FEMA repo facility, that's foreign and international monetary authorities, lets a foreign central bank borrow dollars against its Treasury collateral instead of dumping the bonds outright. Japan's Ministry of Finance has said it will actively use it and Bessant has very publicly pushed the Fed to expand it and therein we have a major revelation.

This isn't about the exchange rate at all. The 31st of July was a defense of the US Treasury market against a forced seller who happens to be America's closest ally. An allied central bank can no longer use the open market to defend its own currency without breaking the bond market of the country whose currency it's defending. Yes, this is as crazy as it sounds. Now, of course, a story like this goes well past crypto.

It runs into sovereign debt and the machinery of the FX market. And if you enjoy deep dives into topics like this, then you should definitely subscribe to the Finance Bureau. That's our dedicated channel for everything macro, markets, politics, anything that will move your portfolio. You can find the Finance Bureau by simply following the link in the description or by scanning the QR code that's on the screen right now.

Right now, back to the FX market madness because it's time to see where the euro was in all of this. The US Treasury did not fund its yen purchases by selling dollars. It sold euros out of its reserve holdings, and European authorities were informed after the trades had already been executed. ECB President Christine Lagard spoke with Bessant by phone on Saturday the 1st of August. The trades were done on Friday. According to reporting from the FT and others around the 7th of August, senior European officials described it as an unprecedented breach of long-standing conventions between Western monetary authorities with one source quoted saying simply quote, "This has never happened before.

Eurog Group President Curyakos Pericakis and the European finance ministers were apparently kept entirely out of the loop. The Treasury's defense is that allocating ESF reserve assets is an internal American matter based on liquidity and valuations. And Bessant apparently told his European counterparts it was quote just a reallocation of our resources. Quite the reallocation. But in any sense, there's a pretty wide range of interpretations of this entire fiasco.

Wall Street consensus is that this is a targeted defense of Japanese financial stability rather than any kind of weak dollar policy declaration. At least that's what's being stated publicly. Bessant talks about the risk in regional terms, warning on CNBC that an uncontrolled yen could send effects like a tsunami across Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia with knock-on pressure on the Korean Juan. Goldman noted the irony that the whole episode reinforced the market's reliance on the dollar as the ultimate liquidity anchor under stress.

So, there's a decent argument to be made for all those perspectives, but it doesn't really survive contact with the market forces at work here. Former Treasury officials Edwin Truman and Mark Saabell both called the euro routing weird or unwise if the goal was purely a bilateral dollar yen correction. If you simply want yen up, you sell dollars. Choosing not to touch the dollar at any cost while moving a third block's currency without asking really does reveal your priorities.

And this theory catches up with reality. Back in June 2024, Zultan Posar floated the idea of a Mara Lago accord and Stefan Moran turned it into a 41page blueprint called quote a users's guide to restructuring the global trading system. The framework proposes coordin