It is widely recognized that financial market globalization has been developing. International financial markets have expanded substantially, and transaction volumes in foreign exchange markets and capital markets have increased markedly. Progress in information and telecommunications...

This commentary summarizes the authors' main points of agreement and disagreement with respect to the proposal written by Dr. Hetzel. The authors agree with Dr. Hetzel's proposal on four points: after a central bank has lowered the interest rate to zero, (1) a central bank is not in fact...

Since the latter half of the 1980s, Japan's economy has experienced the emergence, expansion, and bursting of a bubble economy, characterized by a rapid rise in asset prices, the overheating of economic activity, and the expansion of money supply and credit. This paper examines the mechanism by...

Various proposals have been raised with respect to a desirable framework of monetary policy under the zero interest rate in Japan. By taking due account of such proposals, this paper intends to examine monetary policy options under the environment of the zero interest rate. In so doing, we first...

Japan's economy has experienced an extremely large swing against the backdrop of the emergence, expansion, and bursting of asset price bubbles. When examining the emergence and bursting of the bubble economy from the viewpoint of monetary policy management, should the Bank of Japan have given...

Professor McCallum has written a series of influential papers in which he chooses nominal GNP as the target and monetary base as the policy instrument. Since I believe that it is practically very difficult for a central bank to employ monetary base as the instrument, I was thus very pleased to...