The Bank of Japan decided in its meeting this morning, Thursday, April 28th, to keep the current negative interest rates unchanged as expected at -0.10% with a vote of the majority of members 8-1, and to continue to maintain the ten-year bond yield at 0%.
The bank is buying exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for 12 trillion yen and J-REITs for 180 billion yen. Today, the bank decided to start buying JGBs for ten years at a rate of 0.25% every working day to defend its target of stable yield, while Kuroda, the bank’s president, stressed that the bank would not hesitate to add more stimulus if needed.
In the bank’s quarterly economic forecasts issued with the statement, the bank raised its inflation forecasts To 2% this year, compared to 1.9% in January estimates, and it raised growth rates to 3% from 2.9% in January expectations.
This clear and explicit contradiction in monetary policy between the Central Bank of Japan and the US Federal Reserve and the rest of the central banks around the year that began to tighten monetary policy and race to raise interest rates, while the Japanese Central Bank begins a new stimulus process that pushed the Japanese yen to the levels of 130 this Thursday morning for the first time since April 2002.