Japan

Tuesday marked another milestone in the topsy-turvy world of monetary easing in Japan: The Bank of Japan bought short-term Japanese government debt at a negative yield for the first time, according to market participants, The Wall Street Journal reported. The BOJ scooped up some of the three-month No. 477 Treasury bill, which has traded at a negative yield for the past two trading days amid strong demand, the market participants said. Normally, people who buy debt expect to get their money back plus some interest. Negative yield means the buyer gets back less than he or she puts in.

Japan’s economy contracted more than the government initially estimated, highlighting the challenge for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in steering the nation through the aftermath of a sales-tax increase, Bloomberg News reported. Gross domestic product contracted an annualized 7.1 percent in the three months through June, more than a preliminary reading of a 6.8 percent fall, the Cabinet Office said today in Tokyo. The median forecast of 25 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a 7 percent drop.

It was an odd sort of rallying cry. Just after Sadakazu Tanigaki’s appointment as secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party on Wednesday, the former finance minister said that taxes on consumption should go up again next year, according to the law passed two years ago, the Financial Times reported. Higher taxes “contribute to fiscal stability and help expand policy options”, he said, noting only that “side-effects” should be monitored.

Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics may cut more jobs as it finishes a massive restructuring that is focusing its business on the automotive and industrial sectors and has pulled it back into the black after years of losses, Reuters reported. Remaining steps will focus on selling factories and exiting businesses announced in a 2012 restructuring framework, updated a year ago, with about 40 percent of the plan still to be implemented, Renesas Chairman and CEO Hisao Sakuta told a media round table on Tuesday. "To be honest, maybe we still have slightly too many people," Sakuta said.

A group of creditors of Mt Gox, the collapsed Bitcoin exchange, is threatening a shake-up of bankruptcy proceedings in Tokyo unless the administrator settles its claims in the virtual currency, the Financial Times reported. Once the world’s largest trading venue for trading and storing Bitcoin, Mt Gox went offline in February saying it had lost track of about 750,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and another 100,000 of its own.

The Japanese government trimmed its economic-growth forecast for the current fiscal year ending in March but said that it won't give up on its long battle to bring its debt issuance under control, The Wall Street Journal reported. The world's third-largest economy is projected to grow 1.2% in the fiscal year ending next March, figures released by the Cabinet Office showed Tuesday. That compares with its previous projection in January for a 1.4% increase.

Further draining a pool of assets that will eventually be distributed to its creditors, defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has paid $188,763 to Tibanne, its parent company, as a part of its liquidation, The Wall Street Journal reported. A heavily blacked-out application to make the payments, which was submitted by a court-appointed trustee for Mt. Gox, was revealed on a website called goxdox.com. Two people familiar with the matter have confirmed the authenticity of the document filed with the Tokyo District Court in May.

Mt. Gox Co., once the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, won approval of its U.S. bankruptcy filing, giving a boost to a Japanese investigation into the disappearance of 650,000 units of the digital currency, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey G. Jernigan said today in Dallas she has “ample legal authority” to accept the U.S. filing and recognize Mt. Gox’s Japanese bankruptcy as the foreign main proceeding. The ruling empowers the company’s Japanese trustee to examine witnesses, gather and review evidence, and oversee assets in the U.S., such as servers.

Japanese consumer lender Aiful Corp said on Friday its creditors had agreed with the company's plans to restructure 52.7 billion yen ($517.22 million) of the company's total 162 billion yen in debt, Reuters reported. Aiful will repay the rest of the debt by taking out other loans and will buy back debt from creditors. Conditions on the buybacks were not disclosed, but the company said it will exchange outstanding debt for newly issued bonds that will pay 8 percent and mature in 2020.

Competition to acquire the French energy equipment maker Alstom was expected to intensify on Monday, as Siemens of Germany and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan were said to be preparing to make a joint offer that could pressure General Electric to improve its $13.5 billion bid, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. G.E.’s bid for Alstom’s power generation and transmission business, made in April, has been opposed by French government officials even though Alstom’s board approved the deal.