Word: yen
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...raise your share price: turn employees into customers. But that trick - what some Toyota department heads in Nagoya, Japan, did this week by asking managers to purchase new cars by the end of the fiscal year - won't stop Toyota's sliding stock. As a stronger yen continues to batter Japanese exporters selling into depressed economies around the world, the Nikkei 225 stock index dances around its 26-year...
...yen's value has hovered at around 90 to the dollar for the past two weeks. But currency experts predict it could climb to 85 over the next few months - a level that could trigger intervention by the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan, which would buy dollars in currency markets to boost the greenback and undercut the yen. Some analysts say the exchange rate could soon reach 80 yen to the dollar. That would almost certainly spark another plunge in Japan's beleaguered stock markets - another concern for Japanese authorities...
...Still, it's unclear whether intervention will be necessary. Some argue that the dollar-yen exchange rate is reaching a sustainable equilibrium and that the yen isn't as strong as it appears. "The yen's level until last year was abnormally weak," says Tohru Sasaki, chief currency strategist in Tokyo at JPMorgan Chase & Co. "Now it's coming back to normal...
...Sasaki attributes the yen's recent strength to the unwinding of the yen carry trade, referring to the widespread practice by investors over the past several years of borrowing yen at a low interest rate and investing the funds in currencies paying higher interest rates. That was an easy way to make money until central bankers in the U.S. and other countries began slashing borrowing costs as the credit crunch hit and their economies faltered. The carry trade "is a very strong and powerful movement, and it's difficult to stop it," Sasaki says. "I think that Japanese officials understand...
...Sasaki argues that, compared with a period in the mid-1990s when the yen hit a postwar peak against the dollar, today's negative impact on the Japanese economy is "not that large." That's because the U.S. over the past decade has seen higher inflation than Japan, where prices have been relatively flat for many years. To have the same effect as the peak in 1995 - when the exchange rate reached 79.75 yen to the dollar - Japan's currency would have to soar to 48 to the dollar, he says. "If we think about the inflation-rate differentials...