Japan’s largest opposition party wants to use the Bank of Japan’s exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to help cover the cost of making high school education free as part of the normalization of monetary policy, according to a party official.
"It’s abnormal that a central bank is holding risky assets with a book value of ¥37 trillion ($244 billion),” the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP)’s finance chief Takeshi Shina said in an interview on Tuesday. "Including the latent profits, the assets are about double that value, and it’s a problem that those profits aren’t being returned to the public.”
Shina said he hoped to join forces with other smaller opposition parties to submit a bill to parliament this year after the annual budget is passed. He said the timing was right given increased interest in the fate of the ETFs.
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