Bank of Japan Raises Rate, Halts Emergency Policies
Central bank says stable inflation is in sight and ends unconventional asset purchases
Central bank says stable inflation is in sight and ends unconventional asset purchases
TOKYO—The Bank of Japan on Tuesday ended negative interest rates after eight years and unwound most of its unorthodox monetary easing policies, saying a new era of stable inflation is in sight in Japan.
The decision marks the end of a global era of negative interest rates that began in the 2010s. Other central banks that had introduced negative rates in the 2010s, including the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank , have already moved back into positive territory amid inflation triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
For a generation, the Japanese central bank served as a laboratory for monetary-policy experimentation as it addressed the country’s chronic stagnation, which was marked by flat or falling prices.
On Tuesday, BOJ Gov. Kazuo Ueda said those policies have fulfilled their roles and the principal ones will be ended. The Bank of Japan is moving its key target for short-term rates to a range of 0% to 0.1%, its first rate increase since 2007.
Ueda said the move was justified by steadily rising wages and prices in Japan. The central bank “judged that sustainable and stable achievement of our 2% inflation goal has come into sight,” he said.
The BOJ said it removed a target for the yield on 10-year Japanese government bonds. And it is halting its purchases of assets such as stocks, real-estate investment trusts and corporate bonds that don’t typically go onto the books of central banks. The Bank of Japan has amassed the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in such assets since the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
Market reaction was restrained because Bank of Japan officials had telegraphed their intentions. The Nikkei Stock Average closed up 0.7%, while the yen was down.
The Bank of Japan, which had maintained a negative policy rate since 2016, said it would continue buying government bonds.
“Accommodative financial conditions will likely continue, and these accommodative financial conditions will firmly support the economy and prices,” Ueda said at a news conference. He said he didn’t expect to raise interest rates rapidly.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida welcomed the continuation of easy money, saying it was too soon to declare an end to deflation.
The BOJ had already begun to ease away from its unconventional policies. In September 2016, it set a target of around zero for the yield on 10-year government bonds. After initially enforcing that target strictly, the bank last year loosened its control , allowing the yield to move higher amid a surge in global bond yields. As of late Tuesday, the 10-year yield was 0.725%.
The Bank of Japan’s move to restore traditional monetary policy tools is one example of how Japan’s economy has recently reverted to conditions not seen in more than three decades.
In February, the Nikkei Stock Average hit a record for the first time in 34 years. Japan’s largest labor union said last week that major companies are planning to raise pay by an average of 5.28% this year, the largest increase since 1991.
However, the Bank of Japan’s economic assessment pointed to some warning signs. With China’s economy struggling recently , the BOJ said Japan’s economy “is expected to be under downward pressure stemming from a slowdown in the pace of recovery in overseas economies.”
Two of the BOJ’s nine-member policy board dissented from the decision to end negative rates, saying the economy’s recovery was too fragile to allow for a rate increase.
Katsutoshi Inadome, senior strategist at SuMi Trust, said the BOJ probably saw a window to act after the recent good news on wages, but he said there was a chance Tuesday’s rate increase was premature.
“In a textbook approach, this is timing the bank would have done better to avoid,” Inadome said. He pointed to sluggish consumption in Japan, which Ueda acknowledged as a risk.
Ueda said if the economy received shocks in the future, the central bank would consider using policy tools it has used previously.
“The Bank of Japan is unlikely to make additional rate increases because there will gradually appear more headwinds such as the lack of strength in prices,” said Mizuho Securities chief market economist Yasunari Ueno.
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Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires
Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.
The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.
That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.
The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.
As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.
The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.
The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.
“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.
While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.
“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”
That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.
While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”