Central Banks
Japan Opposition Party Eyes BOJ’s ETFs to Pay for Free Schooling
- CDP’s Takeshi Shina says he wants to return profits to public
- Comments show support for further BOJ policy normalization
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Japan’s largest opposition party wants to use the Bank of Japan’s exchange-traded funds to help cover the cost of making high school education free as part of the normalization of monetary policy, according to a party official.
“It’s abnormal that a central bank is holding risky assets with a book value of ¥37 trillion ($244 billion),” the Constitutional Democratic Party’s finance chief Takeshi Shina said in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday. “Including the latent profits, the assets are about double that value and it’s a problem that those profits aren’t being returned to the public.”