Is the Bank of Japan out of ammo?

The Bank of Japan has struggled to keep the yen down, says Andrew Van Sickle – whether it lowers interest rates or not.

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Lifting Japan out of its slump is proving a strain for BoJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda
(Image credit: Copyright (c) 2015 Rex Features. No use without permission.)

In January, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) pushed interest rates into negative territory in a bid to combat deflation by lowering the yen. Instead, the yen jumped. Last week the BoJ met and decided to do nothing. But the yen jumped again rising by more than 3% in four hours, one of its sharpest moves in a decade. It's a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", says Stephen Foley in the Financial Times.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.