Intervention in currency markets works best when it takes investors by surprise.
Foreign-exchange intervention to lower a currency is far more effective than intervention to support one.
His denial rings true, for currency intervention would be unlikely to shore up the overall market.
In the rich world only Japan has recently resorted to currency intervention, and so far only once.
Third, large-scale currency intervention will eventually cause inflation in China to rise, forcing a change in policy.
It was a dry, terse statement but a dramatic decision, and possibly the biggest currency intervention of modern times.
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Starting off with additional yen strength, Japan finally pulled the trigger on currency intervention after a 6-year respite and defended the level around 83.00 admirably.
Currency intervention has been a growing concern for forex investors, with many now scrutinising the history of a central bank's interventions before deciding whether to invest.
Reserve accumulation, an indicator of the degree of Chinese intervention in the currency market, has slowed markedly since the third quarter of 2011 as China buys less U.S. debt.
Counterintuitively, the dollar seemed to have suffered widespread losses on Friday, a day that Japanese currency intervention would appear to pump up demand for the greenback and prop up its value.
The politics of currency intervention are actually quite simple.
Currency intervention by Asian central banks helps to explain why America has so far been able to finance its deficit without higher American bond yields or a bigger fall in the dollar.
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And gold is also less liquid than foreign currency and so cannot easily be used for foreign-exchange intervention to defend a currency under attack.
Japan may not be the only loser in the currency-intervention game.
For some, political intervention has supplanted an overvalued currency as the biggest risk in Brazil.
Ministry officials have instead been privately mulling the possibility of joint currency-market intervention with America.
Massive central bank intervention can prop up a currency but only temporarily.
On reading the whole speech, he argues that a cut in interest rates would not relieve the pressure on the currency and RBNZ intervention would not have a sustainable impact.
But the record of currency pegs, and intervention in the markets to support them, is mixed at best.
Not only is there less need to hold reserves to defend a currency, especially if intervention is of dubious value, but the other main reason to hold reserves as a safety cushion in times of war, a trade embargo or a banking crisis also looks suspect.
Such moves would cause a headache for central banks worried about the domestic impact of a strengthening local currency, leading to possible intervention.
The hardest blow to the euro, though, was delivered by the ECB's own president, Wim Duisenberg, when he appeared to suggest in an interview that there would be no intervention to save the euro should the currency be hit by the Middle East crisis.
"We definitely take the intervention risk into account when investing in a currency, " says Dagmar Dvorak, director of fixed income and currency at Barings.
In theory, this sort of currency-related imbalance should be the sort of intervention the IMF is good at.
The need for intervention, she notes, puts into question whether the Japanese currency can provide the safety investors are looking for.
But even if the single currency's strength is not enough to prompt intervention, it may delay a hike in interest rates.
Automakers believe currency exchange rates should be established in the floating market, not by government intervention.
The Reserve Bank is due to release foreign-currency transaction data for April later this month, and some analysts say the intervention may have gathered pace again.
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Financial intervention broadly: government control of interest rates and money supply, and long-term currency debasement are somehow non-issues even as federal regulation such as Dodd-Frank sweeps across the private financial sector.
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