Web Trader MT5
Japan’s central bank, established in 1882. The BoJ has spent the last three decades being the world’s monetary-policy laboratory, mostly because it had to. After the asset bubble collapsed in 1990, conventional easing didn’t work, and the BoJ has been improvising ever since.
The list of firsts is long. First major central bank to hit zero rates. First to do quantitative easing (2001). First to buy ETFs and REITs as part of monetary policy. First to cap bond yields directly through yield-curve control (2016). First in the modern era to push policy rates negative.
In 2024, after years of inflation finally returning to Japan, the BoJ ended negative rates, abandoned yield-curve control, and started normalising. The yen, which had been trading at 38-year lows against the dollar, became the centre of one of the year’s biggest macro stories; a sharp rally followed by a global carry-trade unwind in early August.
Example: When the BoJ raised rates from -0.1% to a range of 0% to 0.1% in March 2024, it ended a stretch of negative rates that had run for eight years. The yen still didn’t strengthen meaningfully until later that year, when actual policy divergence with the Fed began to narrow.
