Mrs Watanabe is a term coined to describe Japanese individual investors in FX (foreign exchange margin trading), which came into use in Western economic journals around 2000.
It is noteworthy that enough orders to move the exchange rate at the time came from individual investors, not institutional ones, and also the term is the symbol given to the world’s largest household savings that support this phenomenon.
The traditional practice of women taking charge of household finances reminded me of one of the ‘lost n years’, when women in the ‘economic powerhouse’ known as ‘Mrs.’ quietly stared at their computer screens against a backdrop of persistently low interest rates, salaries that never rose, and part-time employment that made it ‘easier to take time off to currency trading’.