Just two days ago Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister, was being treated like a currency wimp, with markets cheerfully discounting his cabinet's repeated warnings of potential “bold action” against the recent rapid rise of the yen.
Yet Mr Kan on Wednesday gave no sign of relishing his humbling of the traders who sent the yen to a series of 15-year highs after he fended off a leadership challenge from a more vocally interventionist ruling party rival the day before.
Instead, a lugubrious-looking Mr Kan told journalists the decision to approve an intervention that sent the dollar soaring had only been taken after the yen’s recent rapid rise had “reached a stage where we could no longer just stand by”.
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