Mark Moss breaks down Japan's record yen-defense operations: ¥8.5 trillion in July 2026 alone, with four massive interventions totaling roughly $60-87 billion in four years. Despite these efforts, a single U.S. jobs report wiped out the yen's gains, exposing how fragile the currency has become.
This is the biggest one-day defense on record. What are we talking about defense? Well, we have to either buy or sell the currency, right? Supply and demand. There's more buyers than sellers, etc., right? And so the defense of the yen is to buy it to make it strong. If I sell it, it makes it weak, right? So this is the biggest one-day defense on record. Here we have October 21, 2022, ¥5.6 trillion. 2024, This is 5.9 trillion. 2026, April of this year, 6.2 trillion. And now just July 2026, about almost 8.5 trillion yen. Now, this is about $60 billion. But notice, this is just all in the last 4 years. So the biggest defense numbers on the yen in history have all been happening in the last 4 years. And if you notice, they're starting to happen more frequently. And more frequently and more frequently, which means that the yen is just continuing to get weaker and weaker and weaker. $87 billion, the largest defense on records. And with all of that work being done to prop it up, like I said, it just took one jobs report to smash that back down. So we are— $87 billion was spent here, and then the jobs report— the jobs report cost zero. There was no defense needed.
