Japan is Done Tapering

The Bank of Japan has quietly ended asset purhases and even may have started implementing some QT.

Wolf Street: One of the Biggest Money Printers, the BoJ, Stopped Printing Money

The Bank of Japan is one of the top three QE monsters in terms of the absolute amount of assets it purchased. The Fed and the ECB round out the trio. The BoJ started QE over 20 years ago, and went hog wild under Abenomics, which became the economic religion of Japan in 2013. But the era of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended in September 2020, and Abenomics is now finished. What’s left of it is that the BoJ now holds about half of the huge pile of the central government’s debt.

But QE has ended. The BoJ’s overall assets stopped growing, and its holdings of government bonds have started to decline.

As of the BoJ’s balance sheet dated September 30, released on Thursday, total assets declined to a still monstrous ¥724 trillion ($6.4 trillion), below where it had been in May 2021:

Interesting in the context of USDJPY, which this evening moved above its March 2020 pandemic high.

Related: Japanese Yen Hits Pandemic Low vs Dollar, Has a Bear Market Begun?