MOF

On Thursday morning, the Japanese Ministry of Finance released its weekly International Transactions in Securities data covering March 1 to 7, the first full week of the Iran war. Within hours, a widely shared post on X announced: the BOJ had sold ¥400 billion in foreign bonds. The carry trade was still unwinding into the oil shock. This reading is wrong on every count. The data in question comes from Section 1 of the MOF release: Portfolio Investment Assets, which tracks transactions by Japanese residents, not the Bank of Japan. The BOJ’s foreign reserve operations are excluded from this dataset entirely. The ¥400 billion figure was a net purchase of foreign long-term debt securities by Japanese institutional investors. Positive in Section 1 means net acquisition, not net disposition. The sign convention changed in January 2014: plus now denotes buying, not selling. ...