By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: May 22, 2013

TOKYO — The Bank of Japan stood pat on monetary policy Wednesday amid market jitters over volatility in bond markets, which has threatened to undermine the country’s battle to end deflation and stimulate growth in the giant economy.

In a unanimous vote, the bank’s board stuck to its strategy of expanding the monetary base at an annual pace of 60 trillion yen to 70 trillion yen, or $585 billion to $682 billion, through purchases of government bonds, commercial debt and other assets. Those moves pump money into the economy.

After the central bank’s meeting last month, it unleashed what analysts have dubbed a “shock-and-awe” monetary policy, a sea change for a bank that had come to be known in recent years for its caution and conservatism.

Under its new governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan has gone all-out to fight deflation. Declaring he would do “whatever it takes” to combat falling prices, Mr. Kuroda last month announced that the bank would seek to double Japan’s monetary base, as well as the bank’s holdings of Japanese government bonds, by the end of 2014. The aim of such a policy is to keep interest rates low, prompting consumers to spend and businesses to invest in growth and jobs.

In recent days, however, worries have grown about rising interest rates in the government bond market, which could threaten Japan’s monetary policy. Japan is vulnerable to rising borrowing costs because of its high public debt, which is twice the size of its economy. Bonds are also the main financial asset held by banks, pension funds and insurance companies, making a surge in debt yields perilous. The biggest concern for the central bank is volatility in the bond market, where yields are still above levels marked before its meeting last month, Cameron Umetsu, a strategist at UBS, said in a note published ahead of the decision Wednesday.

“This can be viewed as one of the ‘unintended effects,’ which, if sustained, could dilute the effectiveness of the new quantitative and qualitative easing framework,” he said.

The scale of Japan’s quantitative easing is striking. Assuming that the Japanese economy grows by 2 percent a year, the Bank of Japan would expand its assets to just under 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to estimates from CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s assets, which now total about 20 percent of the American economy, and the European Central Bank’s assets, which come to about 28 percent of the euro zone’s G.D.P., pale in comparison.

Japan stands out in another important way. Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in December and has been the main champion of the bank’s new audacity, Japan is coupling its monetary push with heavy government spending, contrary to calls for austerity in the United States and Europe.

Author: Edward Hugh

The future never resembles the past – as we well know. But, generally speaking, our imagination and our knowledge are too weak to tell us what particular changes to expect. We do not know what the future holds. Nevertheless, as living and moving beings, we are forced to act. – John Maynard Keynes

Discussions of the population problem have always had the capacity to stir up public sentiment much more than most other problems.
- Gunnar Myrdal

Last Thursday the yen broke through the psychological threshold of 100 to the US dollar. On Friday the slide continued (see chart), even dropping very close to 102 to the USD at one point before strengthening slightly on the run in to the G7 finance ministers meeting.  

The ostensible source of the sudden shift was a news release from the Japanese Ministry of Finance detailing the fact that Japanese investors bought a net total of 514 billion yen ($5.2 billion) in foreign bonds during the two weeks to May 3. Speculation had been rife that Japanese money funds would start to respond to continuing yen weakness and low Japanese yields by investing abroad. It is still far from clear that this is really going to happen in the short term, but nonetheless the news was sufficient to spark bets on more yen weakness.

Naturally the fall has drawn comment, especially during the run up to last weekend’s G7 meeting. US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told CNBC that while Japan had “growth issues” that needed to be dealt with its attempts to stimulate its economy needed to stay within the bounds of international agreements to avoid competitive devaluations.”I’m just going to refer back to the ground rules and the fact that we’ve made clear that we’ll keep an eye on that,” he said in a comment that was widely seen as drawing a red line in the sand.

But really, what else do external observers expect? On 4 April Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda announced he was going to increase the money base by 1% of GDP per month for the next two years. That is to say Japan’s monetary expansion will be incremental and continuous. Kuroda has even stated he will continue to increase the money base beyond the initial 24 months if the targeted inflation doesn’t come. It was always clear that the country was going to have a difficult time trying to generate inflation and that one of the knock-on consequences would be to continually weaken the yen. So you can’t realistically expect him to turn round and say now, “sorry, we didn’t know it would offend you so,  I’m cancelling the policy”. Anyway, that move would throw financial markets straight into turmoil. Didn’t they understand what they were signing up to when they accepted “Abenomics” at the last meeting?

Obviously there is still a considerable amount of confusion around about what exactly Japan’s problem is, and what the policy is trying to achieve. I have tried to examine the more theoretical background to the problem in my  A-b-e of economics post, but looking through the comments to that piece I realised that I was very tightly focused on one, examining only one aspect of what has come to be known as Abenomics, the inflation targeting component and its theoretical justification. Since ideas about what exactly it is the Japanese government is trying to achieve seem to be many and various, I thought it might be worth coming back and taking a second look at the experiment.

Three Arrows Into The Sunset

The aim of Abenomics is obviously to shake Japan out of its deflationary lethargy and return the country’s economy to a more pronounced growth path. In order to achieve this Japan’s Prime Minister has notoriously identified three policy arrows, or transmission mechanisms:

1) Aggressive monetary easing

2) Strong fiscal stimulus

3) An extensive programme of growth enhancing structural reforms

Achieving the inflation target is effectively the key objective of the first arrow, and weakening the yen is basically the transmission mechanism which achieves the objective. In fact while we have heard a good deal concerning the first two arrows, there is still relatively little on the table regarding the third one, as some commentators have started to wryly note.

Japanese yen's plunge vs. the dollar makes its exports cheaper and its companies more competitive. G7 finance ministers will focus on the Japanese yen at talks in the UK this weekend.  

By Martin Benedyk and Pan Pylas

Financial leaders from the world's top seven developed economies are gathering in the U.K. to discuss how to shore up the global recovery just as the stimulus measures of one its members,Japan, has caused its currency to take a dramatic slide.

Supporting the global economy and the role of central banks are set to be the key points of this weekend's discussions among financial ministers and officials from the Group of Seven countries — the U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K, Italy, France and Canada. But attention will also turn the financial markets, which on Friday were dominated by developments surrounding the yen and the Bank of Japan's super-aggressive monetary policy.

The dollar breached the 100 yen mark late Thursday — the first time in a little over four years. Over the past few months, the yen has dropped sharply as the new government in Japan tries to bring an end to the country's two-decade stagnation.

Japan's central bank has been pumping money into the economy in the hope of stoking inflation — the country has suffered from falling prices for much of the past 20 years, which has hit company profits and halted growth. One consequence of the new inflationary approach has been the sharp fall in the value of the yen against other countries' currencies.

So far there's been a certain amount of support for Japan's economic gamble — even though the yen's decline makes the exports of other countries more expensive.

That's led many in the markets to conclude that the Japanese monetary authorities are actually targeting the exchange rate, a charge officials in the country have consistently denied.

Nevertheless, talk of a currency war — where countries use their exchange rates as an economic weapon — has not died down. If other countries respond to the falling yen by debasing their currencies, Japan will be back at square one and the world economy could suffer.