TOKYO, March 28 - Japanese monetary authorities have conducted dollar-buying intervention in London and New York trading hours in the past few days, foreign exchange market sources said on Friday. The authorities sold the yen covertly through a limited number of big Japanese banks, they sources said. The Finance Ministry has said that Japan intervened in the foreign exchange market earlier this year, spending about 513 billion yen in February and 678 billion yen in January, Bank of Japan data showed.
Speculation has grown in the foreign exchange market that Japan has been conducting "stealth" intervention to make sure the dollar is above 120 yen on March 31, the end of Japan's fiscal year and book-closing day for many of its big companies. The dollar dipped to a low of 119.37 yen earlier this week on pessimism that the war in Iraq would last longer than expected and on weak U.S. economic data. The dollar was quoted at 120.32/37 yen at 0210 GMT on Friday against 119.97/03 in late New York.//