The Bank of Japan (BOJ) today officially ended eight years of negative interest rates that began in 2016. It’s a symbolically important policy shift, and one that reflects very real changes to the Japanese economy.
The bank lifted its prime lending rate to between 0% and 0.1%, up from minus 0.1%, to mark Japan's first rate increase since 2007. The BOJ also reversed other global financial crisis-era policies that began in 2007; policymakers are abandoning the yield curve control (YCC), which was used to cap the yield on 10-year government bonds at no more than 1%, and the central bank will no longer buy exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and REITs.
