日元是2011年最佳的货币 - 尽管政府策划干预旨在削弱该单位。日本央行通过宽松货币政策，将其在今年第一季度推动下降10％，但货币已经反弹了一半。财政部是否会试图再次尝试其手中的手？据纽约德意志银行证券的十大外汇战略全球负责人的艾伦罗斯金，近几个月有几个因素已经在最近几个月被禁用了日元。1月份最大的最大账户赤字为4370亿日元（54亿美元），主要是因为日本在福岛反应堆事故发生后已关闭52个核电站，并且不得不进口更多的石油。此外，在灾难之后，汽车和电子产品等产品的出口急剧下降。恶化的贸易余额表明，政府可能会诉诸于干预并为货币的弱点做出贡献。More significant was the BoJ’s February 12 announcement of fresh quantitative easing in which the bank would buy ¥10 trillion worth of government bonds, the fifth such round of purchases since 2010. Like the Federal Reserve in the U.S., which adopted a similar strategy two years ago, the Japanese central bank was trying to drive down the yield on the government’s benchmark two-year bonds. The BoJ also announced an inflation target of 1 percent, signaling to traders that it would actively keep interest rates down to encourage inflation. Both moves made an immediate impact. The yen, which began the year at 76 to the U.S. dollar, sank to 78.44 on February 16 and reached 83.71 on March 22. That was a decline of more than 9 percent in less than three months. Ironically, quantitative easing succeeded where several rounds of intervention had failed. The BoJ, which acts on behalf of the Ministry of Finance, spent roughly ¥14 trillion in 2011 trying to keep the yen down, without much in the way of results. One reason may have been the crisis in Europe, which made the yen a safe-haven currency. “Japanese investors repatriated a lot of money in the second half from Europe, and that pushed the yen to a really strong level,” says Jens Nordvig, New York–based global head of foreign exchange strategy at Nomura Securities International. “When the risk comes out of the markets, the yen typically performs poorly, and I think that the yen weakness in February and March was just this relaxation.” The latest setback for the yen was March’s disappointing U.S. job numbers, which were reported in mid-April. Currency traders worry that the American economy might slip back into recession, causing the Fed to embark on more of its own quantitative easing. Such fears have prompted investors to sell the greenback and buy the yen again. As a result, the Japanese currency climbed more than 5 percent from its March lows. The yen’s fall and rise has everything to do with yield, says Simon Derrick, London-based chief currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon Corp.: “The history of the past decade has been about Japan’s search for high yields overseas.” Derrick notes that the yen really began to weaken in 2001, when the BoJ adopted a program of quantitative easing and Japanese investors first looked offshore for higher yields. Recent BNY Mellon data shows that after the BoJ turned to quantitative easing in February, money poured out of the yen and into the Australian dollar, which had much higher interest rates than in Japan. But when a slowdown in China sank the outlook for commodity-producing Australia, that money flowed back into Japan, causing the yen to rebound, Derrick says. At its April 10 meeting, the BoJ didn’t mention the yen-dollar exchange rate and left its benchmark overnight call rate unchanged at zero to 0.1 percent, a sign that the yen’s current state doesn’t bother the central bank. The government, which is more sensitive to exporters’ concerns, reacted differently. “I feel the size of daily fluctuations has been a bit large, but I will look at the situation further,” remarked Finance Minister Jun Azumi, leading some analysts to conclude that intervention was again on the table. But such a move could raise tensions with Europe and the U.S., which criticized Japan’s interventions last year. “Rather than reacting to domestic ‘strong yen’ concerns by intervening to try to influence the exchange rate, Japan should take fundamental and thoroughgoing steps to increase the dynamism of the domestic economy, increase the competitiveness of Japanese firms — including those in utilities and services — and raise potential growth,” the U.S. Treasury Department said in a December 2011 report to Congress.
在日本准备主办10月份的国际货币基金组织(imf)年会之际，该国不愿面对令人尴尬的批评，因此在汇率问题上采取了谨慎的行动。但在4月27日，日本央行又购买了10万亿日元的政府债券，进一步证明日本不想让日元在2012年再次成为全球表现最好的货币。••