The Bank of Japan finished selling millions of dollars of stocks it bought from besieged banks during a domestic banking crisis in the early 2000s and the later Lehman Shock, ending a nearly two decade process and bringing closer market attention to the fate of its much bigger pile of exchange-traded funds.
The BOJ’s holdings of the shares purchased from banks hit zero as of July 10, falling from ¥2.5 billion ($17.4 million) 10 days ago, according to its balance sheet report Monday. It’s well ahead of a self-imposed deadline of March next year, although the milestone was expected to happen around this time after a steady drop of roughly ¥10 billion per month in recent years.
The offloading of the shares suggest that the BOJ’s normalization process more broadly could be accomplished without disrupting financial markets, although it would take a considerable amount of time. The assets were originally bought as a crisis response measure, years before the introduction of the massive monetary easing program that Gov. Kazuo Ueda’s board is now in the process of unwinding.
BOJ finishes offloading bank stocks, bringing attention to ETFs
