JAPAN IS NOW ON THE USSA’S CURRENCY WATCH LIST

You may recall that last Thursday, during my News and Views from the Nefarium podcast, I talked about Japan's Norinchukin Bank's announcement that it planned to sell off its foreign holdings, a euphemistic code for that bank selling off US securities and replacing them with something else. The move, quite honestly, does not come as much of a surprise to me, becase for over a decade I've been observing and warning that Japan was gradually, carefully, and cautiously, beginning to peel away the American chokehold on that country, one finger at a time. If you are a newer reader here at this website, a brief synopsis of my argument may be in order;

My first argument was the fact that a new Japanese government entered into power just shortly before the Fukushima disaster, during the waning years of the second Obama (mis)administration. That Japanese government began quietly exploring the idea of a state visit to China of the Japanese Emperor, a visit that the Chinese were actually considering. The visit was highly symbolic, given the historical bad blood between the two countries as a legacy of World War II. This was accompanied by that Japanese government's renewal of its pleas to the USA to shut down its base on Okinawa, long a thorn in Japanese-American relations. The then US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, issued what can only be viewed as an actual threat to Japan that it should reconsider the course it was on, or else suffer severe consequences. Then the twin Fukushima disasters of the tsunami and reactor meltdown occurred. In the context it looked to me then, and still looks to me, that some exotic technologies were employed to bring the Japanese back on to the reservation. That Japanese government fell very quietly, and Mr. Shinzo Abe came to power, and began to conduct a rather remarkable series of diplomatic initiatives over the next few years, meeting with Vladimir Putin to discuss formalizing a peace (technically, Japan and Russia are still fighting World War Two!), and Mr. Abe agreed to table any discussion of the status of the Kurile islands and other territories seized from Japan by the USSR, in return for wider trade agreements and a discussion of turning those territories into duty free zones, with the Japanese not having to pay Russian duties, but agreeing to be subject to Russian law, and so on. It was a breathtaking departure from Japan's traditional diplomatic stance. Then Mr. Abe quietly but firmly began to spend above Japan's constitutional limits on defense spending. In other words, he began to quietly rearm Japan. At the time I argued that while Japan would continue to tout this rearmament as "Japan doing its fair share" to bear its defense burden "in partnership with America", in the long term this was a signal that the Japanese government and deep state - the "Zaibatsu" - had concluded that over the long term America was no longer a reliable ally, and that Japan would have to assume a much greater defense posture in the region. The clue here was the fact that the Japanese began naming their new aircraft carriers with names like Akagi, Kaga and so on, the very names that the Japanese fleet carriers of World War Two carried, the ships that rained down destruction on Pearl Harbor and British ships in the Indian Ocean. The message was, in my opinion, both subtle but very clear.   It would be similar to the modern German Navy naming a frigate the Bismarck or Tirpitz.

Then came the more recent treaty between Japan and India, where both countries agreed to support each other logistically in case either of them came under threat. The obvious object of concern in the treaty was China. But the obvious omission of the USA as a principal to the treaty was the real message: both countries were actually saying that they could not rely on the USA, and weren't doing so. As I speculated at the time, any such logistical treaty would have been bound to have protocols - perhaps embedded in non-disclosed articles of the treaty - on how financial clearing between the two countries would take place in the eventuality of such logistical supports, and my guess at the time was (and remains) that it would be direct, in Japanese yen and Indian rupees, bypassing the dollar completely.

Then last Thursday, the stunning news that Norinchukin Bank in Japan was going to start selling off "foreign assets," i.e., US securities.  Now it's one thing for Russia or China or even India to "de-dollarize". But when Saudi Arabia does not renew the petrodollar agreement with the USA, or Japan (in some degree in response to Saudi Arabia's decision) decides to start selling US securities and no longer carry the same percentages on its ledgers, that's highly significant. As as I pointed out Thursday, expect other holders to frontload Norinchukin's sell off, and that could include other holders of US securities, and long-term allies.  Only Europe seems to be still firmly under the American thumb, and if you've been following the hidden economic struggles between this country and Germany the past few years, you'll realize the USA has been doing all it can to keep the Germans, like the Japanese, firmly on the reservation, even to the point of committing an act of war against that country by blowing up the Nordstream pipeline.

So, with that context in mind, consider this story that was spotted and shared by V.T., one of our regular readers and article contributors:

US puts Japan on currency manipulation watch list

Now this article, in the wake of the Norinchukin announcement, says it all:

The US Treasury Department re-added Japan to its foreign exchange monitoring list on Thursday, where its name had been absent since June 2023. It joins China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Germany.

The listing came after Japan resumed its interventions in the currency market to stop the yen’s rapid decline against the US dollar in April and May.

...

The Treasury Department adds major US trading partners to the currency watch list when it seeks to assess whether the country has manipulated its foreign exchange rates to gain an unfair trade advantage.

Countries are automatically added if they meet two of the three criteria: a trade surplus with the US of at least $15 billion, a global account surplus above 3% of GDP, and persistent one-sided net foreign exchange purchases of at least 2% of GDP over 12 months.

In its biannual report published on Thursday, the Treasury Department said Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Vietnam all met the criteria for having a significant trade surplus with the US, as well as an outsized current account surplus.

In other words, "Bad Japan! Bad Germany! Bad Taiwan! Go sit in your corner and do not produce anything until we say so!" or if I may put that point perhaps less simplistically, the Japanese, Germans, and Taiwanese actually make things, things of quality in fact. Things of quality that are affordable. What does America make? what is its largest export? It makes war, and lots of it, spends profligately, and now apparently cannot even build a quality commercial airliner (we'll get back to that story later this week).  The main gun in our tanks is a German gun, many of the autos on our highways are Japanese, and our computers are being run with chips from Taiwan.  About the only thing the USA does produce is food, and that - with the advent of frankenfoods in the form of GMOs and "synthetic meat" is a dubious proposition, and will also eventually come under foreign regulatory and scientific scrutiny. Russia, recall, hes led the way there by banning GMO foods until further study can be done. (The Ukraine, let it also be recalled, welcomed Mon(ster)santo and other GMO firms with open arms.)

Norinchukin wants to sell off US securities (who can blame them?), and the USA puts Japan on a currency watchlist, and there can be little doubt that the move is at least in part and to some degree a response to the Japanese bank's decision.  But the real watchlist, and the real lessons, are being quickly learned in the rest of the world: by weaponizing the dollar, the USA is really only shooting itself in the foot: a weaponized reserve currency will soon be no reserve currency at all, especially when it is backed up by the military might of a country that does not have an adequate manufacturing plant to sustain it, is making super-expensive weapons systems that don't work as planned and advertised, and continues to think that the missile magnets called aircraft carriers are a wise investment of its unaccounted-for trillions in missing money.

Would you want to rely on such an ally for defense? Would you want to do business with an ally that cannot account for trillions in missing dollars?

The Japanese, like the Saudis, may be the first significant cracks in the dike, because they appear to be answering "no, Mr. Bai Den-sahn" to those questions.

See you on the flip side...

(If you enjoyed today's blog, please share it with some friends).