Last week was a relatively quiet week in the forex market. This allowed the yen to weaken on the back of the poor economic numbers which continue to highlight how the dead cat bounce in the domestic economy during the global expansion years is now returning to haunt both the government and Bank of Japan.

The financial market spotlight fell on my old company Livedoor when I split the company’s stocks by 100. That’s basically when public criticism of me really began to build.

At that time, Waseda University’s Tatsuo Uemura and Michio Matsui, President of Matsui Securities, were the most open critics of mine. In some cases, I don’t think I argued against much of the criticism. I used to think that it was a really adult approach to just let the ones who didn’t know what they were talking about talk.

The Fed's plans to print money sees the yen rally.

It took a while, but Japan’s economic plight has hit the yen.

The yen is still “relatively” strong, but it has weakened by a pretty significant amount against the dollar, nearly 10 points, in recent weeks.

Former Japanese Finance Minister Nakagawa should never have been at the press conference that did in his career, and now has the Japanese press gone mad discussing “reputation risk?”

As well as the big sharks of the financial world, many smaller fish slip through the financial seas, quietly and unobtrusively doing their business, until they become big fish in their own right. One of these has been the SPARX Group, founded 20 years ago, based out of Japan, which had about JPY1.7 tln in assets under management in 2006. These assets are managed on behalf of a number of institutional investors, based on principles learned from George Soros by the SPARX founder, Shuhei Abe when Abe managed Soros’s Japanese investments.