Speaker 3
I mean, for the purposes of central banking, Japan might as well be a different universe. It's like the pandemic never happened. We had one BOJ rate rise earlier this year. Up until then, they'd still had negative interest rates. So it's taken much, much longer for this kind of what people refer to as a normalization of Japanese interest rates to take place. And what you see, this huge gulf that there's been between US borrowing costs and Japanese borrowing costs, which sent the yen to its lowest level in more than three decades earlier this year, appears to be finally moving the other way. So we've seen the yen, the Japanese currency, absolutely roaring back because people think that gap is finally beginning to close.
Speaker 1
So Tommy, what does this mean for Japanese stocks?
Speaker 3
Well, we saw a big sell-off this week. And the reason we saw that is that the Japanese stock market is dominated by big exporting companies. And those companies will always benefit from the weakness of the yen. When that starts to move the other way, people suddenly worry that the Japanese market may be losing its edge. Tommy
Speaker 1
Stubbington is the FT's Markets News Editor. Thanks,
Speaker 1
You can read more on all of these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News Briefing is produced by Kasia Broussalyan, Fiona Simon, Sonia Hudson, and me, Mark Filippino. Our engineer is Monica Lopez. Our intern is Prakriti Panwar. We had help this week from Molly Nugent, Ethan Plotkin, Josh Gabbard-Doyon, Denise Guerra, Sam Giovinco, Green Turner, David DeSilva, Michael Lello, Peter Barber, and Gavin Kallman. Thank you.
