Dollars and Yens

The US dollar is hovering at 100 yen in currency exchange these days. Although I am confident my home currency will recover eventually and once again beat out Japan by a wider margin, this is an economic bright spot at the moment for me, because I get more bang for my yen when sending money back. I have to pay some bills in the US so in the next few days I have to send some money back. I am of course happy to get almost $100 for every 10,000 yen I send back instead of $90.

So what makes the yen strong? Japan hasn't been growing very quickly in the last 20 years ever since the housing bubble burst. And one of the reasons is that people have stuck to very low-risk, low-reward economic policy. They also turned their economy inward, focusing on domestic development (ridiculous overpriced domestically grown fruit, for instance) over international trade.

Whatever that means, Japan doesn't have banks falling left and right at the moment. Instead, it's trucking along just as it has been, although cautiously lest the world drag it along with them into the dirt. And Mitsubishi just bought 21% of Morgan Stanley.

I should have kept up with studying economics more...I want to be able to have grand universal theories about this global economic crisis.