About half of Japanese firms said that new leadership at the Bank of Japan (BOJ) should revise its negative interest rate policies, while more than a quarter said its price target should be changed, a Reuters poll showed.
The Japanese government nominated Kazuo Ueda to head the central bank, as the decade tenure of BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda nears its close.
Ueda was scheduled to speak in the Japanese parliament yesterday, and attention would be on how he could unwind the BOJ’s unprecedented monetary easing without throwing financial markets into turmoil.
Among about 500 major companies polled, 47 percent said the BOJ should modify policies that allow interest rates to go negative.
In the next most common response, 28 percent said the central bank should revise its 2 percent inflation target.
“A sudden change in monetary policy could be very damaging to both firms and individuals, so it would be good to aim for a soft landing,” a manager at an information services firm said, commenting on condition of anonymity.
Only 9 percent said the BOJ should scrap its yield curve control policy, a trading band for bond maturities that has come under increasing criticism by speculators.
A majority of companies — 62 percent — said a normalization of monetary policy would not have a good or bad impact on their business.
Asked to rate Kuroda’s legacy at the central bank, respondents gave him middling to positive grades. On a scale of 0 to 100, 46 percent of respondents — the biggest cohort — put Kuroda in the middle quintile of 41 to 60 points.
Kuroda was rated in the top two quintiles by 40 percent of managers, compared with 14 percent who rated him in the bottom ranks.
“There are pros and cons,” a manager in the electronics industry said, commenting on the BOJ under Kuroda. “It certainly supported the economy, but it also led to massive fiscal expansion by the government.”
Corporate managers remained pessimistic about the near-term environment, with 80 percent saying conditions would be “not so good” to “bad” in the next three months, nearly unchanged from the previous survey.
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