{"id":78278,"date":"2026-08-21T23:32:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/78278\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T23:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:32:13","slug":"as-i-see-it-the-us-is-telling-its-trading-partners-do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/78278\/","title":{"rendered":"As I see it | The US is telling its trading partners \u2013 do as I say, not as I do"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is not the most enticing reading material: \u201cMacroeconomic and Foreign Exchange Policies of Major Trading Partners of the United States.\u201d But this 59-page report, issued last month by the US Treasury Department, reveals much about contemporary America.<\/p>\n

Remember the joint intervention<\/a> by Japan and the United States in the international currency market to prop up the yen at the end of July? By now, everyone knows it didn\u2019t work, a waste of monetary resources for both countries while earning a lot of ill will from the Europeans because \u2026 Well, that takes some explaining but we will get to it shortly.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s first consider the report, which boldly warns trade offenders that the US Treasury \u201cis committed to aggressively and vigilantly monitoring and combating unfair currency practices\u201d and that it \u201ccontinues to assess whether the United States\u2019 trading partners are undertaking foreign exchange intervention and implementing non-market policies and practices to manipulate their currencies for unfair competitive advantage in trade to the detriment of American economic strength\u201d.<\/p>\n

The report goes on to name the baddies: China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland. All these economies were on the monitoring list in the report issued in January this year. So no improvement there, naughty children! Notice that Japan is on the list, recurrently.<\/p>\n

\"AA person walks past an electronic board showing the US dollar and Japanese yen exchange rate at a securities firm in Tokyo on August 3, after the US and Japan launched a coordinated operation to prop up the Japanese currency. Photo: AP<\/p>\n

And yet, in the same month that the US Treasury complained that other countries, including Japan, were potentially manipulating their currencies to gain an unfair trade advantage over the US, it was helping Tokyo, in a highly unorthodox move, to intervene massively in the currency market because the yen had been dropping like a stone since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi took office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is not the most enticing reading material: \u201cMacroeconomic and Foreign Exchange Policies of Major Trading Partners of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50165,45973,12,29413,50164,10348,2211,8,50166,50167,358,2640,52,16929,3283],"class_list":["post-78278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-american-economic-strength","tag-barry-eichengreen","tag-china","tag-european-central-bank","tag-european-perspectives","tag-financial-times","tag-germany","tag-japan","tag-new-york-federal-reserve","tag-office-of-international-affairs","tag-sanae-takaichi","tag-scott-bessent","tag-tokyo","tag-us-treasury","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78278","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=78278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}