Kuroda to leave office with an F for monetary easing experiment

IT would appear that Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda is fated to leave the central bank at the expiry of his current term in April 2018 with his target of achieving 2 per cent annual inflation continuing to recede ever further into the distance even as he steps down.

This much was acknowledged, or at least implied, by the BOJ's decision on Nov 1 to defer (for a fourth time) the target date for achieving the elusive inflation goal to some time before the end of fiscal 2018, or by the end of March 2019 latest.

An irony for Mr Kuroda as he struggles against chronic deflationary tendencies besetting Japan's economy is that the very economic openness and integration he has long espoused is a major cause of his problem. That and the innate conservatism of an ageing and money hoarding-prone population.