Japan says wants a new BOJ governor next week
Written on April 4, 2008
The Japanese government hopes to have a new Bank of Japan governor in place by the time financial chiefs of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations meet next week, the government’s top spokesman said on Thursday.
Japan has been without a permanent head for its central bank for two weeks, after opposition parties that control parliament’s upper house twice blocked nominees to replace Governor Toshihiko Fukui when he retired.
The BOJ has since been in the hands of newly appointed Deputy Governor Masaaki Shirakawa, a stand-in arrangement analysts have said should be avoided in the world’s No.2 economy in the midst of a global credit crisis.
Since Fukui’s retirement, debate over who might succeed him has gone quiet, but Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said the government wanted to resolve the issue soon.
“We are making efforts to present a candidate to the parliament as early as possible, as the prime minister has expressed the need to fill the vacancy in the top BOJ post,” Machimura told his twice-daily news conference.
“We would like it if a new BOJ governor could attend the G7 meeting on April 11, not the acting governor,” he added, referring to a meeting scheduled to take place in Washington.
However, he said there was no specific schedule in place to find a new chief, who would face the same risk of veto in parliament’s upper house that tripped up the two previous nominees.
The vacuum at the top of the BOJ comes after coordinated action among central banks to settle gyrating financial markets and as U.S no fax payday loan. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke conceded for the first time the U.S. economy may slip into recession.
Filed in: money.