Japan spends big to boost yen

New figures show Japan dug deep into its foreign exchange reserves to conduct its recent dollar-selling market interventions and prop up the yen.

The Finance Ministry says that at the end of August, Japan's official reserve assets stood at slightly more than 1.2 trillion dollars. That's a drop of 79.5 billion dollars from July. It's the biggest monthly decline since April 2000, when comparable data became available.

Holdings of US Treasuries and other securities fell by 87.7 billion dollars.

For the period reflected in the latest data, the Japanese government and the Bank of Japan spent more than 15 trillion yen, or about 96 billion dollars, on market interventions. Part of the operation was coordinated with the United States.