BOJ data suggests mysterious yen spike wasn't intervention

[October 05, 2023]  By Kevin Buckland
 
TOKYO (Reuters) - The Bank of Japan's money market data indicated on Thursday that a mysterious spike in the yen rate against the dollar on Tuesday was likely not the product of official Japanese intervention.

Passersby walk past an electric monitor displaying the Japanese yen exchange rate against the U.S. dollar outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan October 4, 2023. REUTERS/Issei Kato

The central bank's projection for Friday's money market conditions indicated a 1.09 trillion yen ($7.32 billion) net receipt of funds, not far from the 800-900 billion net receipt of funds estimated by brokerages, excluding intervention.

Bank transactions for currency intervention take effect two business days later, but the hour of the yen's rebound made it unclear whether it would show up in data for Thursday or Friday.

"It's very close to the estimates," said Norihiro Yamaguchi, senior economist at Oxford Economics. "It's still not clear, but I'd say there was no huge intervention."

After pushing to a nearly one-year high above 150 yen in New York trading hours on Tuesday, the dollar suddenly tumbled almost 3 yen, leading some to suspect that Japanese authorities had intervened to prop up their currency.

Japanese officials have refrained from saying whether they did or did not intervene.

($1 = 149.0000 yen)

(Reporting by Kevin Buckland; editing by Christina Fincher)

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