My Expectations for the Day at the Bank of Japan

Later in the day, the BOJ Policy Board will wind up two days of deliberations by announcing changes in monetary policy aimed at achieving the 2% inflation target in two years. Consolidating BOJ’s asset purchase program with its regular, so-called Rinban, operations seems like one of the easier things on which to achieve a nine-member consensus, though the technical details may take a little longer to work out. Governor Haruhiko Kuroda would no doubt like to secure majority support for all the other four items that have been aired in public, and he could all but erase market uncertainty by bringing all of them to a vote today. However, my guess is that he will only have the board vote on the items for which he has secured a majority and present them outcome as the first stage in a measured rollout process. He cannot afford to have anything voted down so early in his regime, can he?