As Bloomberg reports, BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda will be in Switzerland as the results are announced of the U.K.’s June 23 vote on whether to remain in the European Union.
He won’t be alone: Kuroda will be traveling from June 23 to June 28 to attend meetings of the Bank for International Settlements, where other central bankers also will gather, the BOJ said Wednesday.
Bloomberg notes that given the travel time between Europe and Japan, Kuroda would be unable to chair an emergency meeting if the central bank decides to hold one Friday Tokyo time in the event the U.K. votes to leave the EU.
“This raises the likelihood of the BOJ not taking drastic measures right after the results come out,” said Daiju Aoki, an economist at UBS Group AG in Tokyo. “Kuroda probably sees the benefit of being with other central bankers where they could talk about coordinated action.”
In a press conference June 16, Kuroda declined to comment about whether he’d convene an emergency meeting after the Brexit vote and said the central bank was in touch with counterparts including the Bank of England amid Brexit concerns he said had had an impact in the bond market.
The BOJ can hold an emergency meeting without the governor, according to the bank’s rules. In May 2010, then-Deputy Governor Hirohide Yamaguchi led an emergency gathering in the absence of Governor Masaaki Shirakawa, who was traveling in Europe.
While we are confident that the BOJ will be able to come up with the required quorum and webconference to conduct an emergency meeting even with Kuroda half way around the globe to implement more ridiculous monetary policy as needed, more to the point is that Kuroda will be joined by the rest of his central bank peers at the holiest of holies for central bankers, the BIS headquarters. The good news, if the unprecedented happens and Leave does win, at least it will be very easy for the world’s central bankers to unveil a coordinated, global response to “stabilize markets”, as the ECB’s Mario Draghi warned.
As some have suggested – BofA notably – that may be the ultimately goal, with Brexit as a pretext for central banks to completely take over all asset prices
