Housewives are helping to moderate currency swings by betting against professional investors, according to Bank of Japan Policy Board member Kiyohiko Nishimura.
"The arrival of Japanese households as major investors seems to have affected foreign-exchange markets," Nishimura, 54, said in a speech Monday at a meeting at the Brookings Institute in Washington. "The gnomes of Zurich were accused in their day of destabilizing markets. The housewives of Tokyo are apparently acting to stabilize them."
Nishimura is the first policymaker to comment on increasing foreign-exchange margin trading, which last month helped push implied volatility on one-month yen options to the lowest since the BOJ began compiling data in August 1992.