TOKYO -- The Bank of Japan on Thursday kept its monetary policy unchanged, apparently giving the country's robust economy of the past several months a little more time to get prices moving uphill.
The BOJ's policy board voted 8-1 to maintain an interest rate of -0.1% on some excess reserves that financial institutions keep at the central bank. In addition, efforts to keep the yield on 10-year Japanese government bonds, or long-term interest rates, near zero will be continued. To hold the long rates at that level, the central bank will keep buying JGBs at a pace that will increase its holdings of the bonds by about 80 trillion yen ($710 billion) a year.
