>>14268130>I don’t know much about economics, but I had assumed then yen would get stronger once Japan opened back up. Clearly I know nothing.So due to the massive GDP to debt ratio disparity Japan has had for years (government borrowed domestically to finance lots of infrastructure after the bubble burst) they've had negative/zero interest rates in Japan since 2007. This helped to make borrowing money easy and meant their export heavy economy was worth more domestically due to a weaker yen and low inflation. But after the pandemic ended and massive worldwide inflation started almost every government jacked up their interest rates to fight inflation, to encourage people to borrow less and save more. Except Japan, because their government holds a lot of domestic debt, and higher interest rates make that debt more expensive to hold.
High interest rates means higher payments on that country's bonds. People took their investments out of Japanese bonds and put it into other countries that had high interest rates. Less investment in Japan and its bonds means a weaker yen. This is usually good for an export heavy economy but only up to a point. A very weak yen means you get more foreign money for your product yes but that's not helpful when you're paying 3 times as much for raw materials. So the economy and yen continued to slide down. As an emergency measure, after 17 years of minus or zero interest rates, the central bank of Japan finally increased their interest rate just last month. But only to 0.1%, which means bond investment is still slow and people prefer to save money in counties with much higher interest rates. It's going to take a long time for these interest rate rises to kick in and up the yen. This is a very simple explanation of why nobody wants yen still.
tl:dr yen weak for longer and joshis love America dollar because of 0% interest
