Bank of Japan announces negative interest rates - Latest Current Affairs for Competitive Exams

Question: Name the country whose central Bank recently announces negative interest rates?

(a) India
(b) China
(c) Japan
(d) Bangladesh

Ans (c)

Related facts:

On 29 January 2016, Japan’s central bank, the Bank of Japan after two-day monetary policy meeting made an announcement to implement the negative interest rates.
Voting 5-4 in favour of the measure, the bank announced that it will charge an interest rate of -0.1%.
The negative interest rate will applied from February 16, 2016.
In the simplest form it can be understood as, if a commercial bank will deposit the money in the central bank in return the central bank of Japan bank will charge interest at the rate of 0.1 per cent.
This will boost lending by the commercial bank. This will help the country get out of recession.
This should be noted that Japan’s economy is static for the past ten years despite of several efforts.
Policy Board of the Bank of Japan decided to introduce “Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing (QQE) with a Negative Interest Rate” in order to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent at the earliest possible time.
Bank of Japan has adopted a three-tier system in which each financial institution’s current account balance is divided into three levels.

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told he want to end the perception of decline in inflation in Japan.
He also mentioned that there’s a risk recent further falls in oil prices, uncertainty over emerging economies, including China, and global market instability could hurt business confidence and delay the eradication of people’s deflationary mindset.
It should be noted that prior to the Japan in many countries of the Euro zone announcement of the negative interest rate had been made.

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