Combined monetary, fiscal big bang likely by BOJ in Nov

Tokyo

THE Bank of Japan (BOJ) on Friday disappointed those who had expected further monetary easing to help boost the world's third-largest economy. But there are growing expectations that the central bank will act this month to support Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's bid to push the economy into higher gear through fresh fiscal and monetary stimulus.

This would mark a shift by the BOJ from pursuing an elusive inflation target (which it acknowledged last Friday may not be achieved until early 2017) in favour of a broader growth-boosting strategy aligned with Mr Abe's bid to raise Japan's annual gross domestic product (GDP) by 20 per cent to 600 trillion yen (S$9.96 trillion).

The government reportedly plans to draw up a supplementary budget of just over three trillion yen - some say nearer five trillion yen or one per cent of Japan's annual GDP - for fiscal 2016 in order to help achieve its growth target of around 2 per cent annually in real or inf…