Isn't the issue with the yen more about Japan's lack of productivity growth (both services and goods). If the economy had real potential we would see money coming in to take advantage of the fall in cost to buy Japanese assets. The fact that Japanese companies are not very efficiently run (from a financial perspective -- no debt on the b/s -- piles of cash on the b/s...) and don't produce above market returns keeps buyers away even at the lower prices. I don't have access to an ROE figure for the TOPIX, but I'm guessing it is still quite low...
Japan also has very poor demographics. There sill is no immigration and a birth rate the assures the country of a shrinking population.
I think any short term pain associated with food and energy prices is a reasonable price to pay for the decades of decay that needs to be reversed. Japan needs to rebuild/restart all the nuclear plants. They need to face the music and use one frequency (60 Hz) across the entire country. They need to focus on growing larger quantities of food and not having tiny "high quality" producers -- it is crazy that you can't sell a cucumber in Japan if it is too curved! I don't recall seeing a single large scale farm in my years living in and visiting Japan.
In the short term, the fluctuations reflect the interest rate differential. But the fact that Japan has to keep near-zero rates for a quarter century--and that the real value of the yen is back to its 1971 level, tells us a lot about the low return to capital, chronically deficient private demand, and poor productivity.
As for farm size, I was shocked at the large size of the farms in Hokkaido--one of the reasons that the JA has import barriers about bringing products from Hokkaido into Honshu.
The chart I posted refers to the strong relationship between the interest rate gap and the yen. You can find data on the yen/$ rate on the Bank of Japan website at https://www.stat-search.boj.or.jp/ssi/cgi-bin/famecgi2?cgi=$graphwnd_en Give it a few seconds for the dollar-yen spot rate to show up.
Isn't the issue with the yen more about Japan's lack of productivity growth (both services and goods). If the economy had real potential we would see money coming in to take advantage of the fall in cost to buy Japanese assets. The fact that Japanese companies are not very efficiently run (from a financial perspective -- no debt on the b/s -- piles of cash on the b/s...) and don't produce above market returns keeps buyers away even at the lower prices. I don't have access to an ROE figure for the TOPIX, but I'm guessing it is still quite low...
Japan also has very poor demographics. There sill is no immigration and a birth rate the assures the country of a shrinking population.
I think any short term pain associated with food and energy prices is a reasonable price to pay for the decades of decay that needs to be reversed. Japan needs to rebuild/restart all the nuclear plants. They need to face the music and use one frequency (60 Hz) across the entire country. They need to focus on growing larger quantities of food and not having tiny "high quality" producers -- it is crazy that you can't sell a cucumber in Japan if it is too curved! I don't recall seeing a single large scale farm in my years living in and visiting Japan.
In the short term, the fluctuations reflect the interest rate differential. But the fact that Japan has to keep near-zero rates for a quarter century--and that the real value of the yen is back to its 1971 level, tells us a lot about the low return to capital, chronically deficient private demand, and poor productivity.
As for farm size, I was shocked at the large size of the farms in Hokkaido--one of the reasons that the JA has import barriers about bringing products from Hokkaido into Honshu.
I couldn’t find the chart referenced by the line referring to 1998 cataclysm
The chart I posted refers to the strong relationship between the interest rate gap and the yen. You can find data on the yen/$ rate on the Bank of Japan website at https://www.stat-search.boj.or.jp/ssi/cgi-bin/famecgi2?cgi=$graphwnd_en Give it a few seconds for the dollar-yen spot rate to show up.