The past few weeks have not been happy ones for many central bankers — and none more so than Haruhiko Kuroda, the hapless governor of the Bank of Japan.
That is because the threat of moving rates deeper into negative territory and buying up even more assets has done nothing to weaken the yen down as he desires. Brexit, which briefly sent the yen beyond the ¥100 mark against the dollar on Friday, is a fresh headwind.
The Bank of Japan is likely to move rates from negative 0.1 per cent to minus 0.3 per cent come the end of July, increase its holdings of ETFs from ¥3.3tn to ¥6.3tn as well as its purchases of Japanese Reits from ¥90bn to ¥200bn, economists at JPMorgan in Tokyo predict.