The dollar spiked after the intervention as much as 4 percent past 79 yen from around 75.65 yen. The dollar touched a record low of 75.31 yen earlier on Monday.
Finance Minister Jun Azumi said Tokyo stepped into the market for the second time in less than three months on its own at 10:25 a.m. local time (0125 GMT) and would continue to intervene until it was satisfied with the results.
The Yen is considered safe haven and there have been other recent interventions:
Monday’s maneuver was the fourth time in just over a year that Japan has intervened to stem the yen’s rise.
The BBC reports the Yen dropped 5% to the dollar after the move. One must wonder why is such speculation going on with the Yen, which is considered save haven. It seems in spite of the big Greek debt haircut and U.S. Q3 GDP of 2.5%., markets are leery and believe little has be resolved.
This story is pathetic. In order to survive, find a job, a woman has to leave her homeland, move to a low cost country, accept super low wages, to offer telephone support to....her own country.
I'm not making this up.
In October 2008, when the world was reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and job markets were freezing up everywhere, Akane Natori waltzed into a new position she liked. “Things went so smoothly after applying online, and before I knew it, I had the job,” said Ms. Natori, who was then a 26-year-old sales assistant at an import-export company in Tokyo.
There was just one catch, one that speaks volumes about the Japanese economy and the challenges younger Japanese face in a country where college graduates used to count on lifetime employment with the company they joined right out of school. Ms. Natori’s new job — working in a call center answering queries from customers in Japan — was in Bangkok.
On the 20th Anniversary of the start of Japan's "lost decades", the government of Japan is announcing yet another plan to stimulate their economy.
Japan’s four-month-old Government, already reeling from a political funding scandal and dwindling public support, today vowed to enlarge the economy by 150 trillion yen (£1 trillion) and haul the nation out of a “long, downward-sloping tunnel”.
The Democratic Party of Japan said that the scheme would deliver annual real GDP growth of at least 2 per cent between now and 2020 and create more than 4 million new jobs over the same period....
Halfway through the Government’s ten-year plan, Japan's debt relative to GDP may rise to 246 per cent, according to analysts from the International Monetary Fund.
Japan is trying to lower the labor supply by offering to pay foreign workers to go home.
Japan’s offer, extended to hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Latin American immigrants, is part of a new drive to encourage them to leave this recession-racked country. So far, at least 100 workers and their families have agreed to leave, Japanese officials said.
The program is limited to the country’s Latin American guest workers, whose Japanese parents and grandparents emigrated to Brazil and neighboring countries a century ago to work on coffee plantations.
In 1990, Japan — facing a growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.
Japans exports in one quarter dropped 13.9%. Their quarterly GDP was 3.3% contraction and exports accounted for 3% of that drop.
Japan’s economy shrank at an annual 12.7 percent pace last quarter, the most since the 1974 oil shock, as recessions in the U.S. and Europe triggered a record drop in exports.
The country's gross domestic product contracted at an annual rate of 0.4 percent from July to September, marking the second consecutive quarter of negative growth -- the technical definition of a recession. Japan's previous recession was in 2001, after the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the United States.
Japan's economy minister warned that the situation could worsen: Collapsing sales of Japanese goods in the United States and Europe amid the global downturn threaten to make the country's export-dependent economy even weaker in coming months.
"Downside risks to the economy are growing further, and Japan is in a very serious situation," Kaoru Yosano said at a news conference.
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