The Bank of Japan maintained ultralow interest rates at its meeting last month after considering "the risk of missing a chance" to achieve its inflation target by prematurely revising policy, a summary of opinions at the meeting showed Thursday.
"Although price projections have been raised somewhat, the risk of missing a chance to achieve the 2 percent target due to a hasty revision to monetary easing is much more significant than the risk of the inflation rate continuing to exceed 2 percent," according to the summary of the April 27-28 policy-setting meeting, the first under Governor Kazuo Ueda.
Ueda, whose term commenced in early April, told a press conference after the meeting that trend inflation had been rising.
But he also warned that premature monetary tightening would dampen the prospects for 2 percent inflation, in an apparent attempt to quell speculation that the central bank would be forced to overhaul its yield curve control program, under which short-term interest rates are set at minus 0.1 percent and the 10-year Japanese government bond yield is guided to around zero percent.
At the meeting, the nine-member Policy Board also decided to embark on an extensive review of the central bank's unconventional monetary easing steps implemented since the 1990s, a time when Japan was mired in deflation.
"In order to make it objective and reasonable, this review should be conducted from a broad perspective without bearing a specific policy change in mind," one of the members said during the meeting, according to the summary.
