Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda not only surprised the markets with his latest splurge of monetary easing. He sprang it on his own Policy Board members just two days earlier, jolted into action to stop them from making a lowball forecast that might have sunk his flagship inflation target.
To achieve maximum effect for the shock decision, Kuroda and right-hand man Masayoshi Amamiya kept only a handful of elite central bank bureaucrats in the loop as they laid the ground for the expansion of their quantitative and qualitative easing (QQE) program.
They didn't even give the usual forewarning to senior bureaucrats at the Finance Ministry, according to interviews with nearly a dozen insiders and government sources with knowledge of the bank's deliberations.