On May 20, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry and the Financial Services Agency jointly submitted a request letter asking the heads of national and private universities across Japan to improve the quality of financial education. The FSA, as stated in a ...

The dispute over replacing the Bank of Japan governor, whose seat was left vacant when Toshihiko Fukui’s five-year term ended March 19, was finally settled April 9 when Deputy Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa was officially promoted to chief of the central bank. The new BOJ ...

Bilateral relations can be complicated by conflicting interests, which makes occasional problems inevitable. What’s important, however, is whether the two countries can communicate frankly about the problems, find their causes and resolve them. This is one reason wh countries set up hot lines between ...

The Feb. 9 meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank chiefs — the first one held in Tokyo in eight years — adopted a statement recognizing that the global economy is facing more challenging and uncertain circumstances. The statement underlined ...

The international profile of sovereign wealth funds is expanding, and the Group of Seven’s finance ministers and central bankers are expected to discuss the depth of the funds’ risk control, management and accountability when they gather Feb. 9 in Tokyo. At the same time, ...

On the surface, the ruling coalition’s tax reform package for fiscal 2008 contains a number of promising proposals, including the transfer of local corporate tax revenue from better-off prefectures to fiscally distressed rural areas, a new system to let people combine stock investment returns ...

Japanese housing starts have fallen sharply in recent months, just as housing-related markets in the United States have declined since the advent of the subprime mortgage crisis. But the backgrounds of the two slumps are totally different. In July, Japanese housing starts sank to ...

On Sept. 19, just as global financial markets were getting jittery about the U.S. subprime mortgage loan problem, the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry released its survey of Japanese land prices. The annual survey listed the market prices for land as of July 1 ...

Yasuo Fukuda was elected president of the Liberal Democratic Party on Sunday and is certain to become Japan’s next prime minister this week to replace Shinzo Abe, who surprised the nation Sept. 12 by suddenly announcing his intention to step down. The basic direction ...

The problem with the U.S. subprime mortgage market — housing loans made to high-risk borrowers — had a global impact on markets this month, forcing monetary authorities in Japan, the United States and Europe to pump huge amounts of liquidity into money markets to ...

The biggest feature of this year’s crop of annual shareholders’ meetings — which came on the heels of May’s removal of the ban on triangular mergers — was the move to install defensive measures against so-called greenmailers, the corporate interlopers who chase after short-term ...

Anew set of rules governing capital adequacy of banks debuted this year, and Japanese banks, many of whom close their books in March, became the world’s first to announce their earnings results under the new standards. Thanks to Japan’s continuing economic expansion and the ...