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TOKYO, Sept. 18 ・Under heavy political pressure to bail out the nation's financial industry, the Bank of Japan said today that it planned to buy stocks from banks.
The announcement, which followed a two-day policy board meeting, is a startling reversal of the central bank's longstanding position on the steps needed to clean up Japan's struggling financial sector. The Bank of Japan's governor, Masaru Hayami, had consistently argued in recent years that the central bank had already done all it could by lowering short-term interest rates effectively to zero, and that the nation's lawmakers, not the central bank, bore the responsibility of acting to help the banks.
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Significantly, the central bank's decision comes a day before the government is scheduled to announce details of an anti-deflation package intended to raise stock prices and shore up financial institutions' balance sheets. The timing of the two events suggested to analysts that the central bank and leading policy makers had privately worked out a deal to cooperate.
"We potentially have the long-awaited coordinated effort to stabilize the financial system and ultimately to combat deflation," said Ryo Hino, an economist at J. P. Morgan Securities in Tokyo.
The Bank of Japan's decision was also groundbreaking because most major central banks, as custodians of national currencies, generally shun equities in favor of bonds and credit securities. The law establishing the Bank of Japan prohibits it from buying equities, and would have to be amended before the plan announced today could go forward.
Further, if investors begin to suspect that the central bank will lose money on its stock purchases, as seems likely, the yen could sink in value.
Still, lawmakers here have been publicly calling on the Bank of Japan in recent weeks to buy stocks, because they fear that low stock prices could prove devastating for the banks on Sept. 30, when they must close their books for the fiscal half-year and recognize the losses on their immense portfolios.
Some politicians have also renewed threats to scrap provisions of the law that protect the central bank's independence.
Under such pressure, the central bank appears to have agreed to coordinate its efforts with the government, at least to the extent of helping take some stocks off the banks' hands. Few details were announced.
The Bank of Japan's policy board said in its statement today that the banks' shareholdings were "a significant destabilizing factor" and that "reducing such risk is an urgent task." Mr. Hayami said, "Japanese banks have a lot of shares, and as the central bank, we want to help them reduce the impact of falling stocks."
Mr. Hayami added the Bank of Japan would not rush to buy stocks before Sept. 30; rather, it intends to buy shares from perhaps 10 to 20 publicly traded banks over the next year or two, paying market prices. He said the central bank was still considering how many shares it could buy.
To smooth the way, the finance minister, Masajuro Shiokawa, said he was willing to authorize the central bank to buy stocks.
News of the central bank's decision, late in the trading day here, caused the main Japanese stock index, the Nikkei 225, to jump more than 200 points, retracing most of the day's deep earlier losses and leaving it down just 0.7 percent for the day. Later, Japanese companies' stocks were among the biggest gainers in percentage terms on the New York Stock Exchange. The yen fell against the dollar and government bond prices plunged.
Still, the Japanese stock market is not far above the 19-year lows it touched earlier this month, and at current prices, Japan's largest banks are facing having to book more than $30 billion in losses, a significant erosion of their capital, when the fiscal half-year ends.
For years, the Bank of Japan, ruling Liberal Democrats, financial regulators and bank executives have argued about how to help the banks write off their $500 billion mountain of nonperforming loans and reduce their exposure to the stock market. Each has accused the others of creating or prolonging the crisis.
The banks, meanwhile, are reluctant to unload the $200 billion in shares they hold. For decades, the banks have held shares of their clients' companies to forestall hostile takeovers and reduce volatility in share prices, and were allowed by regulators to count the shareholdings against their capital requirements. This relationship turned into a noose when Japan's asset-inflated bubble collapsed in 1990 and stock prices plunged.
Stocks continued to fall as lawmakers started searching for a solution in the late 1990's. But as the economy soured and bad loans mounted, the banks cut back on lending, starving companies of cash and further choking off growth.
Some analysts expressed concern that the Bank of Japan would find itself stuck with the riskiest and least salable stocks from the banks' portfolios, and face pressure not to resell them ・dooming the central bank to near-total losses on the stocks.
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