NEW YORK: The dollar eased against the Japanese yen on Friday, with traders alert for a second round of intervention after Japanese authorities stepped in to prop up their currency a day earlier. The dollar slipped as much as 0.6 percent to 158.535 yen, before recovering to trade down 0.1 percent at 159.31 yen, a day after sinking 2.4 percent.
The US Treasury has informed a number of banks that it may intervene in the yen market on Friday and that they should “stand ready for future action,” a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Tokyo was also receiving support from the US that “goes beyond psychological support”, Japan’s top foreign exchange diplomat said on Friday.
Eric Theoret, FX strategist at Scotiabank, said it was unclear if Friday’s modest rise in the yen was a result of actual intervention, or traders reacting to the possibility of one in the near future.
“In thin liquidity, intervention can have a much greater impact. Even the mere kind of possibility that this could happen is definitely something that markets are going to respond to in a very sensitive way,” Theoret said.
The Bank of Japan earlier in the day kept short-term interest rates steady at 1 percent in a widely expected move.
The BOJ, which hiked rates to a 31-year high last month, warned for the first time that underlying inflation could exceed its target, signalling further rate hikes from as soon as September.
BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda said many of the board members’ inflation forecasts are fairly high and they see risks skewed to the upside.
Japan’s slow pace of rate hikes has been blamed for pushing the yen to 40-year lows below 163 per dollar recently. Most analysts polled by Reuters expect the BOJ to raise rates again to 1.25 percent by year-end.
Thursday’s moves resulted in spot yen trading volumes surging to their highest in 10 years on the EBS trading platform and futures trading volumes hitting their highest on record, the CME Group said.
In a rare coordinated move, South Korea also conducted dollar-selling intervention on Thursday to support its currency, a market source told Reuters.
The won, which rose to a nine-month high on Thursday, was down about 1 percent at 1,438.71 against the dollar.
The BOJ meeting followed the US Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday to leave interest rates unchanged, which bruised the dollar as traders questioned whether the Fed’s new chair was serious about containing inflation.
That has added to the dollar’s pain with the greenback heading for its biggest weekly fall since early April and a monthly loss of about 1 percent against a basket of peers.
On Friday, it was up 0.2 percent at 100.3, after falling around 1.5 percent in the last three sessions.
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