Articles

Japan’s budget passed. The ceasefire is collapsing. Katayama’s intervention window is open for the first time since she took office.

The incentive structure around US Gulf policy resembles a sold put on regional stability. The licensing portfolio, the 10-year yield and the petrol price all sit on the same side of the strike. The gamma is short. The implications reach the BOJ. This blog has spent the past month tracking Bessent’s financial containment of the Iran crisis: the SPR releases, the unsanctioned crude, the yield curve management. A question that keeps surfacing is whether the Trump Organization’s commercial presence in the Gulf reinforces that containment bias. ...

Scott Bessent has a problem his administration built for him. The Iran war launched on 28 February closed the Strait of Hormuz, removed roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply and pushed Brent above $109 a barrel. The UST 10-year yield has risen to about 4.37%. Markets price zero Fed rate cuts for the rest of the year. Mortgage rates are climbing back toward levels that cost his party seats in previous cycles. ...

In 1274, a Mongol-Korean invasion force landed at Hakata Bay in northern Kyushu. Japan’s samurai, trained for single combat, were routed by massed formations wielding gunpowder weapons they had never seen. A storm forced the invaders to withdraw, but the lesson was plain: the existing military model would not survive a second attempt. The Kamakura shogunate spent the next seven years preparing. It built a 20km stone seawall along Hakata Bay, developed small-boat night-raiding tactics and established Japan’s first permanent coastal defence force. When a far larger invasion arrived in 1281, the seawall held. The Mongol fleet sat offshore for weeks, unable to land. Then a typhoon struck and finished what Japanese preparation had started. ...

Japan’s FSA is quietly reversing 28 years of bank-industry separation. The market hasn’t noticed.

Japan holds 254 days of oil in reserve. That number has been repeated so often since 28 February that it has become a kind of talisman, proof that the country can absorb anything the Strait of Hormuz throws at it. It is also misleading. On 16 March, Prime Minister Takaichi ordered the largest oil reserve release in Japanese history: 80 million barrels, equivalent to 45 days of domestic consumption. The draw came from both private and government stockpiles and was coordinated with a 400-million-barrel IEA-wide release across 32 member nations. Japan’s contribution was the second largest after the United States. ...

Somewhere between $250 billion and $4 trillion, a ghost lives. The yen carry trade (borrow cheaply in Japan, invest where yields are higher) has been the subject of a strange argument since the August 2024 unwind sent the Nikkei down 12% in a single session. One camp says the trade is dead. The other says it never left. Both cite data. Both sound confident. They cannot both be right, and at USD/JPY 160.46 with the vice finance minister invoking “resolute measures” for the first time in his tenure, the answer has stopped being academic. ...

Predicting when a finance minister will intervene in the currency market is a fool’s errand. The MOF does not publish a schedule. The whole point of intervention is surprise: catching speculators wrong-footed, inflicting maximum pain per yen spent. Anyone claiming to know the date is selling you something. And yet. The decision to intervene is not made in a vacuum. It requires political clearance, diplomatic coordination and tactical conditions that do not appear on demand. These constraints are visible. They can be mapped against a calendar. The result will not be a date circled in red but a window, the period during which the political stars align and the MOF gains the freedom to act. ...

In a long-form interview from the Treasury’s Cash Room on 13 March, a week before the worst single-session bond selloff of his tenure, Bessent compared himself to a lifeguard. Drowning people pull you under, he told the interviewer. Your goal is always to save them. For fourteen months he has had solid ground. When JGB yields spiked in January on fiscal fears around the Takaichi snap election, he called Tokyo and the stress faded within days. When the carry trade wobbled in January, a Fed rate check on dollar-yen was enough. Those problems originated in places he could reach. ...

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Part 1 covered the June 2026 Code revision and the ¥126 trillion ($840bn) cash question. Part 1 described the revised Corporate Governance Code – what it asks companies to prove. This article covers what happens to those that do not comply. There are two sources of pressure. The first is structural: a multi-year reconstitution of the TOPIX index that will eject roughly 500 companies by July 2028. The second is behavioural: an activist and institutional investor community that submitted a record 399 shareholder proposals in the 2025 AGM season and is preparing for a 2026 season that falls immediately after the Code revision. ...