A weak yen turned Tokyo into a steal. A strong shekel turned Tel Aviv into the world’s most expensive city to buy McDonald’s

Tel Aviv’s price level is best read as an FX and supply-constraint story, not a broad inflation beta. A stronger shekel is a hidden tax on exporters and a subsidy to importers, so the real winners are companies with foreign revenues and local cost bases that can preserve margins; the losers are domestic retailers, landlords, and anything dependent on price-sensitive local demand. The more important second-order effect is valuation: if local equity outperformance is what is still pulling savings back into shekel assets, that feedback loop is fragile and can unwind quickly once earnings growth slows.

Japan is the mirror image: a weak yen helps tourism and exporters in the near term, but it raises the cost of living for households and squeezes import-heavy businesses. The structural winner is automation/AI capex, because labor scarcity plus currency weakness makes replacing workers with machines economically rational faster than in most developed markets. That favors robotics, factory software, and industrial controls over consumer-facing names that cannot fully pass through cost inflation.

The contrarian risk is that both moves are self-limiting. A BOJ policy shift, or even just sharper imported-inflation pressure, could trigger a fast yen rebound and unwind the tourism trade; in Israel, any meaningful easing in war risk or policy action that unlocks housing/food supply would cap the shekel and relieve consumer stress. For U.S. large caps like AAPL, Japan’s weak yen is more of a unit-demand tailwind than an earnings catalyst, because translation still dominates reported revenue; MCD is even less tradable here since local menu pricing is not a corporate-level driver.