Weird Adventures in Japanese Central Banking
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Hey, these guys in Tokyo are serious. After two decades of studied inaction, the Bank of Japan’s new governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, has just announced shock and awe monetary targets for Japan. You might call it quantitative easing on steroids—or at least fueled by some very fine Niigata sake.
Kuroda aims to double the country’s monetary base by 2014 through increased purchases of Japanese government bonds. The planned ¥7.5 trillion ($75 billion) of monthly bond purchases would expand the bank’s balance sheet at a rate faster than that of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which has also adopted an ultra-loose monetary strategy, according to Masaaki Kanno, a former BOJ official and chief economist at JPMorgan Securities Japan.