I live in Japan and five years ago my drinking buddy at the time only had USD and was about to get on the shinkansen. He needed Yen ASAP. So he said, "dude I'll trade you a 100USD for 10000YEN." At the time it was an easy fifteen bucks or something profit after exchange, so I said, sure, here ya go.<p>I put it in a drawer and forgot about it until a few weeks ago. I'm going to the moon with this, ladies and gentlemen
It used to be the rule of thumb - 1 dollar - 100 yen.<p>I guess it still is - it just went from 1 USD to 1 AUD to now 1 NZD :-D
Diamond hands pays off at last, congrats on the windfall!
Who charges their buddy 15 USD exchange fees on 100 USD? :(
That's the wrong read. It's more that it's easy to understand. "I will give you a 100 dollar bill, please give me a 10,000 yen bill."
Does seem within the range of “hit me back when I see you next week, buddy” though.
He must have been a very itchy man.
He literally put 100USD in front of me, said he forgot to get more yen before his trip, and asked for a favor. Am I really in the wrong from your perspective?
It would be more weird if you or your friend insisted on nickel and diming each other over a favour that would undoubtably be returned in the future.
I did something similar for a US tourist who was making me ashamed of being a US tourist. Got on a boat tour, bar is cash only, he only has dollars. I traded him something like $100 worth of yen, I told him the exchange rate, and that he was paying above it. He didn't care, he just wanted to buy some drinks
You could have given him the bill for his immediate expenses and later give him the difference. Or pay him a beer or a lunch to make up for it. I'd never take advantage of a friend in need like that.<p>And as you said, "it was an easy 15 bucks". You were very aware of what you were doing: easy money off your "friend".
Yes, the move to do was to take a pair of scissors to cut down the 100 dollar bill to fair market value, and give the remainder back to your friend.<p>/s
Yes
If I was in that situation and I’d help my friend not try to make a buck off them when they are down.<p>Between electronic transfer and just settle the debt later, isn’t really an excuse…
Please explain how the situation I described is me "trying to make a buck". You're saying he regretted the terms he presented, and is forever resentful that I didn't drag him to a bank to look up the exchange rate at the time?
It very much depends on the people and the relationship. Through many years, I've swung a few hundred$+ in either direction with a bunch of people, thousands with a couple.<p>I much prefer zero stress - if money is tight, we just don't do expensive stuff, or steal the bill before they have a chance to pay. Mostly that means we stay cheap until we can safely cover multiple people if needed (running your safety-buffer low enough that you can't do that is a terrible idea anyway).
It might have been a gift by his friend. You don't know the details, maybe the friend is more affluent, maybe op had already let him stay in his apartment and given him food and this was the friends covert attempt to even the scale without directly offering money.
This is the kind of handwringing over $100 ethics I come to HN for!
You mean the cost of a couple of beers at the end of the day?<p>OP clearly stated the situation was of a mutual benefit - friend got their Y now and don't need to bother with doing an exchange, OP got a few spare bucks which was a such big sum what it literally sat in the drawer for 5 (five) years.
The BoJ has to raise rates. Dumping Dollars to buy Yen is spitting in the wind.
It's not that simple. Untold numbers of U.S. bonds are held by people running the "carry trade" (borrowing JPY at low interest rates in order to buy mostly U.S. treasuries and make money on the difference).<p>If you raise JPY rates, then these U.S. treasuries are going to get liquidated driving up U.S. rates and of course the U.S. doesn't like that.<p>So, I believe the US is pressuring Japan NOT to raise rates, i.e. to save the U.S.'s own currency.<p>This is undoubtedly why Bessent bought $5 to $10 billion JPY using Euro awhile back (as rumored, the exact amount is a secret). That way he could try and bailout Japan and by using Euro instead of USD, not affect US inflation so much. He also did it without telling anyone in Europe which quite pissed them off as well.<p>It's really funny seeing these shenanigans take place with all the pompousness the US shows regarding its currency and how it pretends it itself is not going broke.
They can't afford to. At 4.5% average rates, their interest payments will consume something on the order of 80% of their government budget and huge portions of GDP. Their 30 year paper was trading at 4.1% last week. If the short end of the yield curve pumps even higher, they are utterly screwed. Consequences of 250% debt to gdp.
Well, hopefully they’ve been smarter than the US about managing bond duration, but yeah. Doesn’t change reality in the currency markets, and sometimes you have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.<p>The US has the same problem. Maybe less extreme, but the balance sheet has tons of short-term debt, and rates aren’t cooperating.
Do you mean BoJ? JCB is a credit card company. It's expected for the BoJ to raise the rate to 1.25% in 2 weeks.
TGA account has around $1T in it. So, Bessent has enough ammo to defend the castle of Japan.
Unless Japan raises interest rates or tightens fiscal spending, no amount of intervention will work as long as the structural problems remain.
Defending currency has to have some quip, right? Something like, "The market can remain honest longer than your central bank can stay solvent"?<p>Always seems to go wrong. Like spraying water on a forest fire with a straw.
Fantastic as someone looking for an affordable vacation destination.
Time to sell some bonds!
In 1985, USDJPY was around 250:1, why 160:1 is now a problem?<p>With almost all of its industries no longer in a leading position, with its car industry being demolished by EVs, 250:1 is what it is heading.
Because that was 1985, and this is now. Entire supply chains, input costs, planning, etc. have been built around the assumption of the JPY trading in some sort of range.<p>Of course that will change over time, if it hasn't already. The Japanese government's messaging about this has been that they're not really worried about the currency weakening (after all they're massive net exporters! it should be a good thing), but rather the speed at which it's happening.
USD is falling vs euro so EURJPY is even more bleak. USD in general during those times was way stronger than it is today so those numbers are meaningless.
In late 1945 the exchange rate was 360 yen to 1 dollar. If that was good in 1945 then it should be good in 2026 because nothing ever changes.
Because you cherry-picked 1985. It went below 160:1 in 1986 and hasn't been back since, until now. So it's the weakest it's been in literally 40 years; that's at least potentially a big deal.
This headline is outdated. It's at 159.82 yen / usd right now.