The Bank of Japan is running out of government bonds to buy.
Its would-be counterparts have become increasingly unwilling to sell the debt that monetary policymakers have pledged to buy, and the most recently issued 30-year Japanese bond did not record a single trade during a session last week as existing owners opted to hoard their holdings.
The central bank has set a target of ¥80 trillion in government bond purchases per year in its continued attempts to slay deflation, an amount that is more than double the pace of new bond issuance planned by the Finance Ministry and about 16 percent of gross domestic product.