A few of the Bank of Japan's board members called for raising interest rates, the BoJ's Minutes of its July meeting revealed on Thursday.
One of the members said that the BoJ should hike borrowing costs "timely and gradually" so as to avoid being forced to hike rates rapidly later, while another member noted that the BoJ needs to "carefully examine the effects on households and firms of a rise in the policy interest and that, when doing so, the Bank needed to take into consideration rises in wages and corporate profits."
A different member said that "with medium- to long-term inflation expectations not being anchored at 2 percent, prices remained vulnerable to downside risks, and that the Bank should therefore avoid a situation where market expectations for future policy interest rate hikes increase excessively." The normalization of monetary policy "must not be an end in itself" one board member said.
