BOJ’s Harada: Bold monetary easing clearly has helped improve economy

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) board member Yutaka Harada is on the wires now, via Reuters, making a scheduled speech titled ‘Economic Activity, Prices, and Monetary Policy in Japan’, with the key comments found below.

Key Quotes:

"The Bank has implemented quantitative and qualitative monetary easing -- or QQE for short -- since April 2013 and introduced various additional measures such as the negative interest rate policy, yield curve control, strengthening the framework for continuous monetary easing, and clarification of forward guidance for policy rates, all with the aim of achieving the inflation target of 2 percent.

As a result of these measures, Japan’s economy has been improving. It is true that the economic expansion has not exactly been robust, reflecting such events as the consumption tax hike in fiscal 2014 from 5 percent to 8 percent, the latest hike in October 2019 from 8 percent to 10 percent, the slowdown in the global economy observed from mid-2015 through early 2016 and from the second half of 2018 to the present, and the downtrend in the working-age population."