Japan just set a new record nobody in Tokyo’s finance ministry wanted to break. The government spent 15.4 trillion yen on foreign exchange intervention last month, the largest single-month currency defense operation in the country’s history.
To put that in perspective, that’s roughly $100 billion deployed in a matter of weeks to buy yen and slow its slide against the dollar.
A mounting pattern of escalation
This new record eclipses what was already a year of extraordinary intervention. In 2024, Japan spent approximately 15.3 trillion yen (around $99 billion) across the entire year to stabilize its currency. The fact that a single month now matches a full year’s prior spending tells you everything about the trajectory here.
The previous monthly record was set during late April to May 2024, when Japan deployed 9.8 trillion yen.
