Bank of Japan cuts economic growth, inflation view

"....pumping about 80 trillion yen ($648 billion) into the financial system annually in a bid to jack up prices and kickstart growth."

While removing an equal amount of bonds and other return-yielding assets. Which is why this policy hasn't help create any inflation for 15 years. Not much of a "pump," is it.

The BOJ hasn't added money into the system to jack up prices or kickstart growth. It has done this only to provide the government with more revenue to loot, squander, buy votes, and amakudari jobs for the politicians and bureaucrats who enacted the policy.

While removing an equal amount of bonds and other return-yielding assets.

These bonds and other assets would only return a yield if there were buyers willing to buy them. If it were possible to earn a good return on theses "assets", the government would have done so.

I thought that the Japanese Government (Abe) wanted to prop inflation in order to keep under control the monstrous National debt. [ n (trillion yen of debt) - 2% ( "thanks" to inflation) = a lot less national debit "magically" disappearing ]

Deflation may sound good for shoppers, but it means people tend to put off buying because they do not expect prices to rise and hope they might even get goods cheaper down the line.

A sentence this biased would get edited out of an article in a high school journalism class, but here we see it not only making the editor's cut, but copy-pasted verbatim into article after article.

Growth would turn around by the third quarter, Kuroda said. “Prices will likely pick up at a significant pace some time during the end of this fiscal year” to March 2016, he said.

Growth will "turn around", Mr. Kuroda? So the positive growth of 1.7% (well above the inflation rate), is going to go into negative territory? And then you follow this not with something about how the economy will grow, but how prices will increase.

Price increases are not growth. They're the polar opposite of growth: they represent a decline in the value of workers' savings and labor. If your savings is taken from you, you can't buy as much in the future.

Of course, the ones doing the taking merely pay lip service to your future. What they want is to devalue all that debt they piled up by debasing the currency. The currency which they issue, and which you are paid in.

While Abe destroys the legal and constitutional base on which modern, peaceful Japan was constructed, Kuroda does the same thing with the economy. The arrogance of these two is just breathtaking.

What Greece is to Europe, will JP become to the world sometime? Or is the kagemusha big enough to shade all the debt?

While removing an equal amount of bonds and other return-yielding assets. Which is why this policy hasn't help create any inflation for 15 years. Not much of a "pump," is it

Jeff, for once we agree. Even if you, Guy and some others are right, and Japan has a virtually unlimited ability to float debt, the question is still "So What"? It isn't working. After nearly three years, all Kuroda can say is:

But he told reporters after the meeting Wednesday that the BoJ was still on track to hit the price target by next year, and that the weakness in exports was due to a still-recovering US economy.

So the U.S. is to blame because domestic consumption is still weak, and Japan is still too dependent on exports. What kind of economic "strategy" is that?

Dilemma; Print more Yen and make the exporters richer and make the consumers poorer. Do you want to continue this way, Mr. Kuroda?

Creating asset bubbles in the midst of an aging and declining population, is stretching the underlying economic fundamentals wider and wider from the inflating stock and property prices. Asset bubbles in the midst of general peoples' deflation. What a crazy solution?

Toilet paper has gone up. Kind of sad, because you cannot cut back on it.

Deflation may sound good for shoppers, but it means people tend to put off buying because they do not expect prices to rise and hope they might even get goods cheaper down the line.

When you base your policy objective on a myth it shouldn't really be much of a surprise when you don't have success. The amount of economic activity that is even affected by price expectations at all is trivial compared to the amount where there is no relation, ie. necessities like food, clothing, transportation. Nobody says I'm not going to eat this week because food might be cheaper next week. It is also trivial compared to the amount of spending people don't do because they, uh, drumroll....don't have the money to spend. And even in the small number of cases where people might wait for prices to come down they don't wait forever. Nobody would have bought a computer in the last 30 years if they did. So all that happens if consumers think prices might fall is that a small amount spending is time-shifted into the next couple of accounting periods, and any money saved is likely spent on something else. Overall effect is a big fat ZERO. And all the evidence (and I know economists like evidence SO much) suggests that if people expect prices to rise they actually spend less, not more.

On Wednesday, the BoJ stood pat on its record asset-purchase programme, which is pumping about 80 trillion yen ($648 billion) into the financial system annually in a bid to jack up prices and kickstart growth.

Money spent buying government bonds in the bond market adds zero yen to the financial system. They were bought by the seller with yen in the first place. Purchase of other assets does add yen, but as they said "to the financial system", not to the economy. Virtually useless and a waste of everybody's time.

Japanese people say it is too expensive to visit the UK where I do most of my business. Returning from Thailand last week the plane was full of Thais -very few Japanese. I got through immigration in record time.when I travel now I no longer see the vast numbers of Japanese I once did. With Japanese monetary policy being as it is I expect there'll e fewer Anne fewer Japanese going abroad....