Title: Japan's Lowflation Problem
Headings: Japan's Lowflation Problem
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Japan's Lowflation Problem

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Jul 31, 2018,08:25am EDT
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Japan's Lowflation Problem
Frances Coppola
Former Contributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Banking & Insurance
I write about banking, finance and economics. This article is more than 2 years old. Share to Facebook
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If ever there were evidence that very low interest rates and QE don’t work, it is in Japan. Japan’s inflation rate has been on the floor for most of the last quarter-century. So have its interest rates. And the Bank of Japan has been doing QE longer than any other central bank: its first experiment with large-scale asset purchases was between 2002-6. The current Governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda, is throwing everything he has at Japan’s lowflation problem. The Bank of Japan is buying up Japanese government bonds as fast as the government can issue them, and is also buying corporate debt, ETFs and REITs.