Investors shocked by unexpected appointment new head of BoJ
2023.02.13 08:52
Investors shocked by unexpected appointment new head of BoJ
By Tiffany Smith
Budrigannews.com – The publisher of one of the academic volumes on monetary policy stated that it was considering new runs to meet demand, and prices for academic books written by the surprise choice for the new governor of the Bank of Japan have increased significantly in recent days.
Investors scrambled to figure out what lies ahead for the world’s third-largest economy after learning late on Friday that 71-year-old Kazuo Ueda is likely to lead the BOJ. Ueda was never even considered to be in the running.
Ueda was on the board of the central bank from 1998 to 2005, but since then he has been working in academia and think tanks, so it is hard to know what he thinks about Japan’s decade-long ultra-easy policy experiment.
Some people are looking to his academic books for clues, but they’re hard to come by and expensive.
On Monday, a copy of his book “The Fight Against Zero Interest Rates,” which was published in 2005 and has a recommended retail price of 1,700 yen (about $13), was listed as having sold for 29,800 yen (about $225).
Prices for additional copies reached as high as $266 ($35,288).
BP (NYSE:), the book’s publisher, told Reuters that it was thinking about printing the book again and making it available as an e-book. According to the publisher, only 8,500 copies were produced during the previous run and were all sold out.
In 2017, he wrote another book in Japanese. It was the best-selling e-book in the finance section on Amazon (NASDAQ:). the site for Japan on Monday. On the website, all of his other books in hard copy were sold out.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is scheduled to announce his choice for Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s successor.
Economists and analysts stated that Ueda is something of an unknown quantity for many market participants.
On Friday, expectations that he might end ultra-loose policy sooner than expected led the yen to rise, but gains were quickly trimmed when he said in a television interview that the BOJ’s current policy was “appropriate.”
Tetsuya Inoue, who served as Ueda’s staff secretary while he was a member of the central bank board, stated in an interview on Monday that Ueda probably would not rush to overhaul loose policy and would instead let economic data dictate the timing of the exit.
