Why Trump is helping prop up the Japanese yen

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**Kimberly Adams** (0:31)
The US steps in to help out Japan in the currency markets.
From Marketplace in Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams. The Trump administration is helping Japan prop up its currency, the yen. Over the summer, the yen fell sharply against the dollar, at some points hitting a 40-year low. This weekend, President Trump confirmed his administration intervened to stop the fall, buying up yen to strengthen it. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer has more on this.

**Nancy Marshall-Genser** (0:58)
Japan has been struggling with the low value of its currency. It imports a lot of oil, which is priced in dollars. When the value of the yen falls against the dollar, that gets expensive. So on Friday, the Trump administration did a coordinated intervention with Japan. The US. Treasury Department bought up yen, boosting its value. It's not clear how much that cost. Speaking on Air Force One over the weekend, President Trump called the yen purchases a signal of friendship.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:26)
We have a good relationship with Japan. We're very strong, very, very strong financially.
They have a weakening yen and they wanted a little bit of help, and we're always there for Japan. Japan's been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor.

**Nancy Marshall-Genser** (1:42)
But the currency intervention could help the US. If the yen gets stronger against the dollar, American products will be cheaper for Japan, making them more appealing. Also, Japan holds a lot of US. Treasury bonds. If it's forced to sell them, to fund yen purchases, flooding the market, the US would have to offer a higher interest rate on new bonds. That gets expensive, especially since the Trump administration is running a large deficit right now and borrowing a lot. Washington and Tokyo are vowing to intervene again to boost the yen if necessary. In a post on X, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Treasury Department remains attentive and in close communication with its counterparts in Japan, and quote, We will not hesitate to participate in further joint intervention. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genser for Marketplace.

**Kimberly Adams** (2:30)
Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported a 24 percent increase in year-over-year revenue last quarter, driven mostly by demand for AI products and infrastructure.
But the use of Google Search in AI mode is also getting more popular, and causing growing worries that this way of searching might make the web less open. Marketplace's Megan McCarty-Corino has been covering web traffic and the growing role of AI in search, and I recently spoke to her about this. I asked her how websites that have relied on Google traffic for click-throughs to their site are managing.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:04)
We've seen some numbers from publishers, you know, declining clicks on their website. Business Insider, for instance, reported that their traffic is down 35% year over year. I've seen a number of other, you know, major publishers, Huffington Post, Washington Post, reporting pretty massive decreases in traffic over the last several years since, you know, kind of generative AI became a way that people search for information.

**Kimberly Adams** (3:32)
You can hear more of my conversation with Megan in our podcast feed or at marketplace.org.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:53)
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Try Odoo for free at odoo.com, that's odoo.com.

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