Icarus Asia Research
Research and commentary by Icarus Asia Research, published on Asian Value Investor.
News · Rates & FX · Japan, US · 21 Aug 2026
Sometime this month, the United States Treasury reached into its own history and bought back a bond that almost everyone had forgotten.
Deep Dive · Rates & FX · Japan, US · 4 Aug 2026
The joint intervention pulled USD/JPY back from a 40-year low in four trading days. It left Japan's fiscal overhang, its energy-driven trade deficit and its rate gap with Washington exactly where they were.
News · Rates & FX · Japan, US · 4 Aug 2026
The instructions were four words, scrawled by hand: "To Do: Buy Japanese Yen $5-10 bil."
Deep Dive · Banks · India · 31 Jul 2026
HDFC Bank spent two decades outrunning India's benchmark index. A deposit deal booked as marketing spend, a bond scandal out of Dubai and a chairman who quit over "values and ethics" have turned the country's model bank into its biggest governance story.
News · Banks · India · 31 Jul 2026
MUMBAI — The board of HDFC Bank, India's largest private lender, fined its own chief executive this week over his handling of a state government deposit, a rare public rebuke that has deepened a run of governance…
Deep Dive · Macro · US · 30 Jul 2026
A 9–3 hold, three hawkish dissents, and the return of price discovery to the bond market
News · Markets · US · 30 Jul 2026
The Fed held rates steady Wednesday for the second time under its new chairman. The bond market's answer was a 19-year high on the 30-year yield, and a widening argument inside the Fed about how little a central bank can say out loud.
News · Markets · US · 29 Jul 2026
South Korea's stock market lost as much as $2.18 trillion in value over two trading days this week. The cause wasn't a Korean problem. It was a chip company's earnings report that beat every record in its history and still wasn't good enough.
Deep Dive · Macro · China, Japan · 27 Jul 2026
A structural shift in the geography of low-cost financing is underway across trade finance, bond markets and official liquidity channels, though not yet in headline policy rates.
News · Macro · Japan, China · 27 Jul 2026
Japan's path to normalization has given way to a new source of cheap funding to not just the region, but to the wider world as China's two-pronged strategy to stoke its economy and negate the effects of U.S. tariffs keeps rates low.
News · Macro · India · 19 Jul 2026
A Reserve Bank of India program built to draw dollars from wealthy Indians abroad is losing momentum, undercut by the same overseas funding costs it was designed around
Deep Dive · Policy · China, US · 9 Jul 2026
Why a US statutory gold revaluation is a balance-sheet exercise, not a monetary regime change, and what fifty years of monetary history actually teach about the limits of coordinated adjustment.
News · Policy · China, US · 9 Jul 2026
The International Monetary Fund cut its global growth forecast this week, and the reasoning was almost more revealing than the number itself. The fund said Wednesday it was modestly downgrading its outlook for the world…
News · Ideas · Global · 7 Jul 2026
Google Research has built an artificial intelligence model capable of analyzing spreadsheet-style data and generating predictions without the hours of manual setup that such work has traditionally required — a step the…
Deep Dive · Macro · Japan · 6 Jul 2026
USD/JPY is trading near four-decade lows even after the Bank of Japan ended yield curve control and raised rates three times. A comprehensive look at forty years of yen intervention, what the tool can and cannot do from here, and the policy mix that gives Tokyo the best odds.
