Some at BOJ baulked at ex-chief Kuroda's 'bazooka' stimulus - 2013 meeting minutes
By Leika Kihara
TOKYO (Reuters) — Some Bank of Japan (BOJ) policymakers baulked at former chief Haruhiko Kuroda's idea of deploying a «bazooka» massive stimulus a decade ago, unconvinced central banks had the power to jolt public perceptions, accounts of the meeting released on Monday showed.
The 2013 deliberation underscores a challenge central banks around the world still face — the difficulty of communicating policy intentions effectively and convincing the public of the impact its monetary measures had on the economy.
The BOJ releases the full account of its policy-setting meetings after a decade.
Hand-picked by then premier Shinzo Abe to pull Japan out of deflation, Kuroda shocked markets by deploying in April 2013 a massive asset-buying programme and pledging to fire up inflation to its 2% target in roughly two years.
The decision marked a turnaround from the approach of his predecessor Masaaki Shirakawa, who was suspicious of the idea that central banks could shake the public out of a deflationary mindset with radical stimulus measures.
«My belief is that we need to deploy unprecedented monetary easing steps… and communicate it in a simple way to overhaul market and public expectations,» Kuroda said at the policy meeting on April 3-4, 2013, according to a full excerpt of the deliberations released on Monday.
Under intense criticism for doing too little, too late to end Japan's economic stagnation, many in the nine-member board agreed to what one BOJ staff described as a «shock-and-awe» approach.
«We must shift away from a piecemeal approach,» then-deputy governor Hiroshi Nakaso said. «We need to radically overhaul market and public expectations with bold easing.»
Not all in the board, however, were fully
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