July 4 (UPI) — As a weak yen persists, Japan’s two stock indexes closed Thursday at record highs beating March’s all-time high at that time as the U.S. dollar fell in Japan.
The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average closed Thursday at 332.89 points from Wednesday’s 40,913.65, while the broader Topix index finished 26.29 points going over its last high 35 years ago in December 1989 as the U.S. dollar’s value in Japan fell toward the lower 161 yen range this week.
It now surpasses a high in March when Japan’s Nikkei stock index breached 40,000 for the first time, closing at a record-high 40,109.23 after reaching a high of 40,314.64 during trading.
The markets in the United States were closed because of Independence Day.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Finance Ministry in May confirmed it had spent trillions of yen to slow its dramatic fall against the U.S. dollar.
“The lack of intervention by Japan’s Finance Ministry has contributed to a sense of security in the market,” Shingo Ide, chief equity strategist at the NLI Research Institute, told Japan Today on Thursday. “Which has interpreted it as authorities accepting the rate of around 160 yen to the dollar.”
This was followed last month in June when the Japanese yen fell below 160 against the U.S. dollar in its lowest point in more than 37 years as Tokyo scrambled to determine what appropriate intervention measures to take.
Ide added how the Japanese market has been propped up by stock and bank gains, which have become attractive to investors as Japan sees a rise in long-term interest rates.
A financial expert says despite any perceived economic woes in Japan, the government has been “far more focused and far more willing to address them” than he has seen in nearly 40 years.
“I think there’s going to be an explosion of opportunity in the venture capital space,” Ed Rogers, an official with Rogers Investment Advisors, told CNBC Wednesday on a television show.
Rogers said the dictating logic for years has been that foreign businesses needed to be in China to do business in Asia, but he argues that in the last few decades things have changed.
It arrives as the Pentagon announced Wednesday it will deploy dozens of advanced fighter jets to multiple bases in Japan as part of a modernization plan amid growing tensions with China, North Korea and Russia.
“Japan geopolitically since 2022 is in a different place,” Rogers was quoted, citing stronger U.S.-Japanese diplomatic and military ties in recent years and the Indo-Pacific region.