Observations: The BoJ’s discount rate, 9% in 1980 has fallen steadily to 0.3%. The 10 year JGB yield has dropped consistently from 8% in 1990 to -0.28%. The BoJ’s asset purchase programs have seen its balance sheet grow from 110 trillion JPY in 2010 to 436 trillion JPY expanding at 30% per annum. BoJ ownership

What is Helicopter Money? There is still much confusion over what exactly ‘helicopter money’ means. In 1969, Milton Friedman coined the term in an extreme example to illustrate a point. “Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is,

In December 2011 the ECB embarked on its first 3 year LTRO, or long term refinancing operations. This is basically a secured credit line available to banks posting eligible collateral. LTRO 1 was a great success raising 489 billion EUR which the banks used to purchase sovereign bonds and unwind inter Euro area current account

We have seen how effective QE can be. Not very. Not for Main Street at least. For Wall Street, QE has depressed bond yields and helped to camouflage the overvaluation of paper assets supporting them at inefficient levels for too long. More than that, the effectiveness of QE is wearing out like an over prescribed

If I told you that it was a good idea to buy a negative yielding bond because I thought the yield would get more negative, thus paying for the potential of a future capital gain, you would probably think I was mad. Or seriously dependent on a greater fool. Or bought an option. If I