Japanese Yen
JPYDecades of QE
Japanese Yen M2 money supply
Broad money in JPY (cash + deposits + close substitutes), annual back to ~1960 via World Bank FM.LBL.BMNY.CN. Log scale auto-engages for hyperinflation outliers.
Japanese Yen inflation history
Annual CPI YoY since 2001 — World Bank consumer price index for Japan. Inflation volatility is one of three inputs into the Money2069 sound-money score.
Purchasing power calculator
How much would your Japanese Yen be worth today if you'd held it since…?
Calculation: cumulative product of (1 + CPI YoY) from the chosen year through 2024. Source: World Bank consumer price index (annual). Daily-refreshed.
Data sources & methodology
- FX (USD):
- Frankfurter / ECB · daily
- CPI YoY:
- World Bank FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG · annual
- M2 broad money:
- World Bank FM.LBL.BMNY.CN · annual (LCU)
- Market cap (USD):
- M2 / FX rate · daily
- 10-year M2 change:
- (M2 today / M2 10y ago) − 1
- M69 score:
- Weighted: CPI (50%), 10y M2 growth (40%), 1y FX stability (10%)
- Last fetched:
- 2026-04-25 15:46:58
- Country code (ISO 3166-1):
- JPN
Note: Decades of QE
Raw data: /api/v1/currencies/current/JPY
The Japanese Yen from a sound-money lens
Decades of QE; a deflation laboratory that finally tipped to inflation in 2022.
The Japanese yen is the world's longest-running monetary experiment in zero-bound policy. The Bank of Japan cut rates to 0% in 1999, ran the first quantitative easing programme (2001), and never meaningfully tightened until 2024. Across that quarter-century, M2 broad money grew from roughly ¥600 trillion to over ¥1,600 trillion — a 2.7x expansion against a flat-to-shrinking population.
For most of that time, yen debasement was invisible because Japan was deflating: CPI averaged near zero or slightly negative through the 2000s and 2010s. The "lost decades" narrative was less about the yen failing and more about it succeeding too well — purchasing power held while wages stagnated.
Then 2022 broke the spell. Imported energy and a yen that fell from ¥110 to over ¥160 per dollar pushed CPI above 4% YoY for the first time since the 1990s. The BOJ's response — tiny rate hikes from −0.1% to 0.25% — was less an end of accommodation than an acknowledgement that the experiment couldn't continue indefinitely.
The yen's story is unique: a currency that printed enormous amounts of money for thirty years without producing inflation, until it suddenly did. For sound-money observers, it's the cautionary tale that monetary expansion always shows up eventually — sometimes via prices, sometimes via the exchange rate, sometimes after a delay long enough that an entire generation forgets what discipline looked like.