Sep 19 2014

Rate Range Projection by Bank

 Next week 108.00- 110.00

Next 3 months 105.00 - 110.00

 

The currency strengthened 0.3 percent yesterday, the most since Sept. 3, after a Yomiuri newspaper report cited Shiozaki as saying that he is in no hurry to submit a bill needed to review GPIF’s allocations. “The yen’s reaction after Shiozaki’s remarks explains how closely the market is listening to him,” said Daisaku Ueno, the Tokyo-based chief currency strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. “It helps explain the enormous expectations there are around how the minister in charge of the world’s largest pension fund will revamp GPIF in a way that cater to Abenomics’ fight to exit deflation. Shiozaki is ‘Mr. Risk-on’.

 

Health ministers usually don’t roil currency markets -- then there’s Japan’s Yasuhisa Shiozaki.

 

The yen fell the most in a week and domestic stocks unwound some of their slide after Shiozaki, whose ministry overseas the nation’s $1.2 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund, said today the government will conduct some reforms within the existing law and there is no intention of postponing the process. The GPIF changes are accompanying Abenomics, a three-pronged policy of radical monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and pro-growth policies.

 

The yen dropped 0.3 percent to 109.06 per dollar as of 5:28 p.m. in Tokyo, after touching 109.46 on Sept. 19, the weakest since August 2008. It has tumbled 4.5 percent this month. The Topix index of domestic shares closed at 1,331.95, down 1.1 percent, after earlier dropping as much as 1.8 percent. The gauge climbed to a six-year high of 1,346.43 yesterday.