In the long negotiation between national prosperity and corporate survival, Japan's automakers have placed a quiet but telling bet: that the yen, now hovering near 157 to the dollar, will remain in that range through early 2027. Toyota, Nissan, and their peers have built their earnings forecasts around the assumption that last week's rare U.S.-Japan joint currency intervention — the first of its kind since 2011 — will hold the line without fundamentally redirecting the yen's course. It is a wager not merely on exchange rates, but on the capacity of governments to balance competing goods: prote