Aug 4 (Reuters) – The Trump administration will do “whatever it takes” to support Japan’s effort to \u200bstabilize its currency, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“We will do whatever it \u200ctakes to support them in a way that helps the American economy, the American taxpayer,” Bessent said in an interview on CNBC two days after confirming the Treasury had joined Japan’s finance authorities in an intervention last week \u200bto prop up the yen.<\/p>\n
Bessent said the yen’s substantial undervaluation could trigger other economic \u200bproblems or competitive devaluations of other currencies “which is unhealthy.”<\/p>\n
The U.S. Treasury chief \u2060did not discuss the mechanics of U.S. participation in Friday’s joint intervention with Japan. He said that \u200bhe was happy that the Japanese government wants to use a COVID-era Federal Reserve backstop for key \u200bcentral banks, the Foreign and International Monetary Authorities Repo Facility, which would allow the Bank of Japan to borrow up to $60 billion to support the yen.<\/p>\n
“The FIMA facility was done in 2020, the size of the bond market \u200bwas much smaller then, so I think it would be reasonable for the Fed to consider \u200bup-sizing the facility,” Bessent said, adding that its purpose was to “protect the U.S. economy and keep any volatility \u200coffshore.”<\/p>\n
Regarding \u2060U.S. sales of euros to buy yen, Bessent said he was in close contact with European partners including central banks.<\/p>\n
“I assured them that it was just a reallocation of our reserves. Seems to me the euro is much closer to an equilibrium price,” Bessent said.<\/p>\n
“I’m not going to talk \u200babout where the euro should \u200bor should not \u2060trade, but it’s really the substantial undervaluation of the yen here and the policies that the Takaichi government is putting in place to change that.”<\/p>\n
\u200bAsked about the Reuters photo of his Friday “to do” list containing the words, “Buy \u200bJapanese yen (JPY) $5-10 bil.,” \u2060Bessent said: “I just wanted to make sure that all the reporters looking on over my shoulder also knew the symbol JPY for the Japanese yen.”<\/p>\n
Bessent joked that he wanted to finish the list \u2060with items \u200bincluding, “go and have lunch with the (Iranian) supreme leader, play \u200btennis with Putin, you know. But I thought I would just leave it at the buy five to 10 billion (dollars) of \u200bJapanese yen.”<\/p>\n
Reporting by Dan Burns, Doina Chiacu and David Lawder, Editing by Louise Heavens and Andrea Ricci<\/p>\n
Disclaimer:\u00a0The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and\/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aug 4 (Reuters) – The Trump administration will do “whatever it takes” to support Japan’s effort to \u200bstabilize…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1108,1095,1100,1102,1094,1105,1098,1096,1099,1106,1085,1107,1097,8,1084,1109,1091,1110,1093,1088,1089,1087,1090,180,1092,1104,1111,1086,1103,1101],"class_list":["post-68938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-bank-forecasts","tag-bitcoin-news","tag-central-banks","tag-charts","tag-crypto-news","tag-currency","tag-economic-reports","tag-ethereum-news","tag-forecasts","tag-global-economy","tag-gold","tag-international-policy","tag-interviews","tag-japan","tag-kitco-news","tag-market-nugget","tag-metals","tag-mining-minutes","tag-mining-news","tag-palladium","tag-pgm","tag-platinum","tag-platinum-group-metals","tag-politics","tag-precious-metals","tag-rare-earth-metals","tag-roundups","tag-silver","tag-tech-metals","tag-us-dollar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}