How Japan is going to save the euro

Japan’s bout of money-printing could have knock-on effects for Germany – and that could hasten the arrival of easy money Europe.

What will be the most interesting result of Japan's impressive entry into the currency wars? It might be another Asian crisis; it might be a hyperinflation; it might be that Japan regains its position as the world's scariest exporting superpower. But there's another possibility not many have yet thought about that Japanese monetary policy could save the euro (in the medium term at least).

Look back to the mid 1990s and the Asian crisis. All sorts of reasons are offered up for the wave of economic disaster that swept the region at the time. But one of the core ones was the behaviour of the Bank of Japan. A sudden burst of activist monetary policy there had shifted the yen from 80 to the dollar to 140.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.