TODAY'S PICKSRATES / DEBTGross ¥55tn, net under ¥1tn: the arithmetic of the interest bill
The ¥55tn figure circulating online assumes a 5% JGB across the entire stock and quotes the gross interest bill, which flatters neither the arithmetic nor the balance sheet it sits on. The government holds more than ¥150tn of US Treasuries, and the coupons on that book return to the same consolidated entity that writes the interest cheques. Net the two and the payment runs under ¥1tn a year — 0.1 to 0.2% of GDP on the consolidated measure, a ratio that has been falling since the mid-2000s rather than climbing. The national accounts show the same shape going back to 1980: gross interest paid peaked in the early 1990s, interest received peaked alongside it, and the black net line has spent four decades well inside the red bars. None of which makes a rate shock costless. The stock reprices slowly, but it does reprice, and at the margin the flow shapes the fiscal path for a decade. It does mean the number driving most of the panic is the gross one, and the gross one is not what the state actually pays.
AUG 2026FX / CARRYThe world's cheapest funding currency
Currency-forward implied three-month yield puts the yen at 0.91%, under every major currency except the Swiss franc. That is not a curiosity; it is a job description. The trade is to borrow yen and hold something that pays — Brazilian real at 12.64%, Mexican peso at 6.78%, South African rand at 6.72%, Australian dollar at 4.42% — and over the past year that carry has returned more than 10% before any spot move at all. So yen weakness has stopped being purely a story about the US-Japan rate differential and become a story about the role the yen occupies on everyone else's balance sheet: the short leg, the funding leg, the thing sold in order to own something better. The uncomfortable part is that the role persists as long as the short-end gap does, and the gap is a policy choice made in Tokyo. Intervention can bruise the trade. It cannot reassign the job.
AUG 2026GDP / DEMANDStrong prices, weak demand: the BOJ's hardest quarter
Q2 real GDP rose 0.3% quarter on quarter, against a consensus above 2% annualised. The composition is worse than the headline. Domestic demand subtracted 0.2pt while external demand added 0.5pt, and most of that external contribution came from imports falling rather than exports rising. Household consumption was −0.1%, capital investment −1.2%, housing investment −0.5%: private domestic demand negative across the board. Consumption was +1.0% in nominal terms and −0.1% in real terms, which is the whole problem in two numbers. Real employee compensation improved year on year and spending still did not move, and the explanations available — a downward bias in the household survey, June's bad weather, or a wage-to-consumption loop that has never actually closed — point to very different policy conclusions. Meanwhile the GDP deflator held in the high 2s. Prices strong, demand weak: the pairing that makes a rate decision hardest to justify in either direction.
AUG 2026 SOVEREIGN CREDITTwo ledgers, one sovereign: the 77.6% at the centre of Japan's debt argument
Robin Brooks argues Japan is already in a debt crisis; it simply does not resemble the G10 crises markets were trained to recognise, so almost nobody calls it one. Read the consolidated balance sheet and the picture inverts: assets of 192.4% of GDP against liabilities of 270.0%, leaving net liabilities at 77.6% — roughly the United Kingdom, and down from 118.4% in 2012 and 24.7% in 1997. The distance between the two readings is not ideology. It is a question of which assets a reader is willing to count, and a decade of yen weakness has quietly marked foreign reserves and pension holdings far above book while the BoJ absorbed 93.6% of the bond stock onto its own side of the ledger. Net interest paid on the same consolidated measure runs at 0.1 to 0.2% of GDP. Both numbers are published by the same statistical system, both are defensible, and the choice between them decides whether Japan is a fiscal emergency or an ordinary European sovereign with an unusual asset mix. Very little of the commentary makes that choice explicit.
MACRO WIRE · AUG 2026API ENDPOINTSGET /api/jin/latest200 ✓ free
最新観測日の指数。観測値 + matched + 方法論。GET /api/jin/seriesHTTP/1.1 402 ✓ $0.01
指数の時系列。機械向け。GET /api/jin/moversHTTP/1.1 402 ✓ $0.02
その日動いた品目。特売タグ付き。機械向け。
決済は Solana USDC。discovery は /.well-known/x402.json。
METHOD / NOTES- 日次・固定基準（2026-06-04 = 100）の Jevons 指数。マッチした同一 SKU の幾何平均。
- single store, Tokyo metro delivery area, mid-tier supermarket (Life). Not nationally representative.
- excl_promo は基準日・当日いずれかで特売タグの付いた SKU を除外した基調系列。
- これは観測であって予測ではない。確率値や見通しは返さない。