The Bank of Japan is often accused of being a laggard. When it comes to releasing details of its policy meetings, however, it’s jumping the gun.
More than 12 hours before Tuesday’s decision was officially announced, reports in the media indicated that the central bank was preparing another tweak to yield-curve control — a leak that proved to be substantiated.
In fact, the fourth estate now looks like the preferred method of disseminating the bank’s increasingly complex decisions. In three of the five meetings since Gov. Kazuo Ueda took over earlier this year, substantial details of steps the monetary policy board was set to make have appeared first in media reports, even as those deliberations were still in session. Indeed, every time Ueda has announced something — from the change to forward guidance in April, to tweaks to YCC in July and now in October — that information has appeared initially not in the public domain, but in the pages of the Nikkei newspaper.