by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
All eyes are on the Fed, which will follow. ECB also getting nervous. Other central banks are way ahead.
The Bank of Japan is one of the top three QE monsters in terms of the absolute amount of assets it purchased. The Fed and the ECB round out the trio. The BoJ started QE over 20 years ago, and went hog wild under Abenomics, which became the economic religion of Japan in 2013. But the era of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended in September 2020, and Abenomics is now finished. What’s left of it is that the BoJ now holds about half of the huge pile of the central government’s debt.
But QE has ended. The BoJ’s overall assets stopped growing, and its holdings of government bonds have started to decline.