The central bank failed to sound a deflation alert. “At present there is no reason to expect that overall prices will drop sharply and exert deflationary pressure on the entire economy,” policy makers wrote in their monthly report, signed off by the governor.
That governor was Yasuo Matsushita and the report was published in January 1998. Within six months, Japan’s consumer prices excluding food began falling in a trend that would mark the next 15 years.
The concern now for economists from Barclays Plc to Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. is that European Central Bank President Mario Draghi risks making the same mistake as the Bank of Japan — publicly playing down a deflation threat — and ultimately may have to introduce quantitative easing.
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