The End of Cheap Yen
How Japan Finally Broke With Zero Rates

About this book:

For three decades, Japan was the world's monetary laboratory—pioneering zero rates, inventing quantitative easing, buying equities, and capping bond yields. The yen became the engine of global finance, an endless river of ultra-cheap capital that inflated assets from New York real estate to emerging-market debt. Then, in the spring of 2024, the experiment ended. Under Governor Kazuo Ueda, the Bank of Japan shattered the zero-rate orthodoxy it had built, triggering a violent repricing of risk that is now unwinding the largest carry trade in history and forcing a global financial system addicted to free Japanese money to relearn the price of capital.

*The End of Cheap Yen* takes you inside the most radical monetary saga of our time: the 1989 bubble whose collapse destroyed three times Japan's GDP in wealth; the "zombie economy" where corporations hoarded cash instead of investing; the desperate improvisations of Abenomics, Kuroda's "bazooka," and the descent into negative rates; and the dramatic 2024 pivot—spurred by imported inflation, a collapsing currency, and the surprising resurrection of *shunto* wage negotiations. Drawing on deep reporting from the BOJ's Nihonbashi boardroom, the Ministry of Finance, and the trading floors where trillions rode on the yen, this book reveals how a nation trapped in deflationary psychology became the template for the West's post-2008 playbook—and why its exit is the most consequential financial event since the financial crisis.

This is not just a Japanese story. As Japanese insurers and pension giants repatriate trillions from overseas bonds, as regional banks confront duration risk for the first time in a generation, and as global markets digest the loss of their primary funding currency, the repercussions are only beginning. *The End of Cheap Yen* is the definitive account of how we got here, why the exit is infinitely more dangerous than the entrance, and what the new paradigm means for every portfolio, policy decision, and paycheck in the interconnected world.