The minutes from the Bank of Japan due today are for the March meeting.
Prior to the meeting minutes the Bank publishes its ‘Summary of Opinions’. For this meeting these can be found here:
At the meeting in March the Bank remained on hold.
The key points from the Summary were:
- BOJ will continue to hike rates if economy, prices move in line with forecast
- The downside risks from the U.S. are heightening sharply and could have negative impacts on Japan’s economy, so we must be even more cautious on deciding next rate-hike timing
- Downside risks to Japan’s economy are, in turn, heightening due to U.S. tariff policy, supply chain disruptions, so must keep policy steady for time being
Those final two are why the Bank is on hold and looks like could be for another few meetings. The meeting that followed on May 1 also saw the Bank leave policy on hold.
- This snapshot from the ForexLive economic data calendar, access it here.
- The times in the left-most column are GMT.
- The numbers in the right-most column are the ‘prior’ (previous month/quarter as the case may be) result. The number in the column next to that, where there is a number, is the consensus median expected.
This article was written by Eamonn Sheridan at www.forexlive.com.