In April 2013, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda first vowed that his team would "do whatever it can" to end deflation. Many were quick to equate the pledge with Mario Draghi's "whatever it takes" promise at the European Central Bank. On Oct. 31, Kuroda backed up his words, dramatically increasing the central bank's bond purchases to about $700 billion annually. Markets were thrilled.

Yet whatever the BOJ is doing clearly isn't working. Tuesday's gross domestic product numbers for the third quarter showed that Japan is back in recession — its sixth in the past two decades. The problem is traction. Printing mountains of yen doesn't do any good if banks refuse to lend, and households and businesses don't borrow. The only people benefiting from Kuroda's largess right now are punters. Bloomberg News reports that Kuroda's policies have helped make investors in Japanese stocks $1 trillion richer over the last two years.

Is there another way to encourage Japanese to spend, thus reviving the inflation and confidence Japan lost 17 years ago? Here's one idea: a BOJ debit card. That's the suggestion of Gabriel Stein, director of asset management services at Oxford Economics in London. The logic is this: Just as the U.S. bailed out banks after its 2008 crash, Japan is today bailing out the bond market and, by extension, the government. History might've been kinder to then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner if he'd used hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to aid households, rather than Wall Street firms. In Tokyo's case, why doesn't the BOJ just offer cash payments directly to Japanese families, and perhaps small businesses, too?