May 20, 2022 - Financial Occultist

People’s Bank of China benchmark rates setting.

1 year at 3.7%, unchanged
5 year at 4.45%, a 15bp cut
In April the one-year loan prime rate was held at 3.70% while the five-year remained at 4.60%. The last time there was a change was when the rates were trimmed slightly in January this year.

The LPRs are benchmark lending rates, set on the 20th of each month. 18 commercial banks in China submit their proposed rates to the People’s Bank of China. The LPRs are based on the current rate charged for the PBOC Medium-term Lending Facility (MLF).

USD/JPY to 150 is “quite possible” says Mr. yen

20-May-22 05:17 am

Anirudh Sethi

Bloomberg (link is gated) carry a report with comments from Eisuke Sakakibara, who was Japan’s vice finance minister from 1997-1999 and thus directed multiple rounds of yen FX intervention. He was gvien the nickname Mr Yen.

Sakakibara is now a professor at Tokyo’s Aoyama Gakuin University. He spoke in an interview on Bloomberg TV:

“Market expectation is that toward the end of the year, it will go between 140 and 150 — so it is quite possible that the yen would reach that level,”

The report goes on:

The yen’s plunge has sparked verbal intervention by Japanese officials to talk up the currency, though that has done little to effectively halt its slide. It is unlikely that the authorities will intervene on a bigger scale because there’s still a reasonable explanation for the currency’s weakness, Sakakibara said.
“This has happened because of the difference of the monetary policy,” he said. “I don’t think that neither the Bank of Japan or Japanese government are worried about the current state of affairs with regards to the exchange rate.”