An employee of the foreign exchange trading company Gaitame.com works next to monitors showing the current Japanese Yen exchange rate against the US dollar after the reports of the Bank of Japan ending eight years of negative interest rates, in Tokyo, Japan March 19, 2024. [Photo/Agencies]
TOKYO -- The Bank of Japan (BOJ) on Tuesday decided to end its negative interest rate policy and yield curve control policy, marking a major shift away from the long-running monetary easing that Japan has seen over the past decade to put an end to deflation.
After a two-day policy meeting, the central bank's policy board decided to guide short-term rate to a range of zero to 0.1 percent, up a fraction from minus 0.1 to zero percent, introducing a rate hike for the first time in 17 years since February 2007.
The BOJ also scrapped its yield curve control policy of keeping 10-year Japanese government bond yields at around zero percent to maintain accommodative financial conditions.
The central bank introduced negative rates and yield curve control in 2016, which had been a symbol of the BOJ's more-than-decade long ultra-loose monetary stimulus.
The widely expected move on Tuesday follows robust pay increases that have heightened the BOJ's confidence that a healthy wage-price cycle is taking root in Japan, and mild inflation will continue.
