Japan is urging the world’s regulators to treat crypto as strictly as they do banks, adding to the calls for tougher rules following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX digital-asset exchange, Bloomberg News reported. “Crypto has become this big,” Mamoru Yanase, deputy director-general of the Financial Services Agency’s Strategy Development and Management Bureau, said in an interview.
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Japan
The Bank of Japan is under pressure to revise policy again at its meeting ending Wednesday after investors repeatedly attacked the central bank’s new 0.5% cap for the 10-year government bond yield, the Wall Street Journal reported. The battle between the BOJ and the markets has upended what are expected to be the final months of Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda‘s decade in the job. He has devoted his term to keeping interest rates ultralow, a policy that many market players believe is likely to end this year with inflation in Japan nearing 4%.
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Japan’s financial watchdog expects the local unit of Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto empire FTX will repay funds to customers starting next month, according to a senior official, Bloomberg News reported. “We have been in close communication with FTX Japan,” said Mamoru Yanase, deputy director-general of the Financial Services Agency’s Strategy Development and Management Bureau. A mid-February timeline for withdrawals announced last month by the firm is likely a product of such communication so “we are expecting that they will properly take steps based on that,” he said.
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US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. is closing the bulk of its operations in Japan as part of a move to adjust international investment amid a slump in the digital-asset sector, Bloomberg News reported. The shift comes as the firm cuts 20% of its workforce globally, the latest layoffs at the San Francisco-headquartered firm. Coinbase is scaling back in Japan even as the nation loosens some crypto rules, which has spurred rival Binance — the largest digital-asset exchange — to seek a license to return to the country.
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The United States and Japan on Friday launched a new task force to promote human rights and international labor standards in supply chains and said they would invite other governments to join the initiative, Reuters reported. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai signed a memorandum on the initiative in Washington with Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura.
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The world’s pile of negative-yielding debt has vanished, as Japanese bonds finally joined global peers in offering zero or positive income, Bloomberg News reported. The global stock of bonds where investors received sub-zero yields peaked at $18.4 trillion in late 2020, according to Bloomberg’s Global Aggregate Index of the debt, when central banks worldwide were keeping rates at or below zero and buying bonds to ensure yields were repressed.
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Japan is the world’s largest creditor. At the end of 2021, it held roughly $3.2 trillion in foreign assets, 30 percent more than No. 2 Germany. As of October, it owned over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt, more than China. Japanese banks are the world’s largest cross-border lenders, with nearly $4.8 trillion in claims in other countries. Late last month, the world got an unexpected reminder of how integral Japan is to the global economy, when the country’s central bank unexpectedly announced that it was adjusting its stance on bond purchases, the New York Times reported.
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FTX Japan customers will be able to withdraw their funds as of mid-February, the subsidiary of FTX Trading said in a blog post on Thursday, making them some of the first customers of the collapsed crypto exchange to get their money back, CoinDesk.com reported. FTX Japan said that it was previously able to confirm with the company's bankruptcy lawyers in the U.S.
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Digital currency exchange Kraken will close down its operations in Japan next month, in another sign of consolidation in the battered crypto industry, CNBC reported. In a blogpost on Wednesday, Kraken said it would cease crypto trading services through its Japanese subsidiary, Payward Asia, and deregister from Japan’s Financial Services Agency on Jan. 31, 2023. It is the second time Kraken has left the Japanese market. The first was in 2018, when it closed four years after initially establishing operations in 2014.
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday dismissed his fourth minister in two months to patch a scandal-tainted Cabinet that has raised questions over his judgment of staff credentials, the Washington Post reported. Kenya Akiba, minister in charge of reconstruction of Fukushima and other disaster-hit areas, has faced allegations of mishandling political and election funds and of ties to the Unification Church, whose practices and huge donations have raised controversy.