BoJ nominees offered contrasting policies

Two nominees for the Bank of Japan deputy governors, appointed by the government, offered contrasting policy views on Tuesday, raising questions as to how aggressive the BOJ's policy will be. The first nominee Kikuo Iwata, an academic whose research focuses on inflation targeting, thinks that the Japanese central bank should purchase longer-dated government bonds in order to reach its 2% inflation target in two years or even sooner. However, another nominee Hiroshi Nakaso, suggested there are limits to what monetary policy can do to end nearly 20 years of deflation. As nation's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed for an overhaul of the central bank's management, the next governor as well as his deputies should share Abe's views about monetary and fiscal policies.