telegraph.co.uk / By Telegraph staff and agencies / March 12, 2013, 6:20AM GMT
Japan’s yen fell to a 3 1/2-year low against the dollar as minutes of the Bank of Japan’s February meeting highlighted expectations for increased monetary stimulus.
The currency slid against all of its 16 major peers as BoJ deputy governor nominee Kikuo Iwata told parliament that “bold monetary easing will be necessary for some time.”
Last month Prime Minister Shinzo Abe named Iwata, 70, a professor at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University, to be one of the two new deputy governors of the BoJ in a shift for more aggressive monetary easing to achieve a 2pc inflation target and end nearly two decades of deflation.
“Dollar-yen has seen a big run up because of expectations for Bank of Japan easing,” Imre Speizer, a strategist at Westpac Banking Corp. in Auckland, told Bloomberg. “The talk by officials is much more aggressive than it was previously. The market wants to see whether their actions will be much more aggressive too.”
The yen fell 0.4pc to 96.63 yen per dollar after earlier touching 96.71 yen, the weakest since August 2009. The dollar rose 0.1 percent to $1.3030 per euro.
The minuted showed that some board members said that buying longer-maturity Japanese government bonds and increasing purchases of risk assets are options to expand easing efforts.
Recent Comments