Japan Comic Highlights Currency Fears

Here's a story on the Yahoo home page that I think you'll all enjoy. It seems the Japanese get more useful information from their COMIC BOOKS than Amuricans do from their "fair and balanced" media....

By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP Business Writer

TOKYO - The plot is sinister: U.S. officials trick Japanese authorities into intervening in the exchange market to buy the falling U.S. currency — not to save vulnerable Japanese exporters from the dangers of a high yen, but to keep America's economy from sliding.

This story line from a comic book now selling in Japan may be implausible. Nonetheless, it highlights growing fears here over seesawing currency fluctuations.

There's little doubt that if the yen rises too much against the dollar, Japan's fragile export-driven recovery could sputter. Prices for Japanese products abroad would soar and earnings of major companies would plunge.

It's true that Japanese authorities have been dipping into the market for months. They have been spending a fortune buying and bolstering the value of the dollar while keeping the yen lower.

complete story here

The Japanese have been dropping polite hints that if the U.S. didn't do something about interest rates, they would have to put more of the Bank of Japan's resources into gold, rather than dollars, hints of which the Fed has not exactly acknowledged publicly.

If it gets ugly, and it might, it will get ugly in a hurry.

to prop up the US economy? Obviously, the writer has not got the foggiest idea about the state of US-Japan economic relations during the past 20 years.