Japan's central bank and the private sector must prepare for positive interest rates and a normalization of monetary policy, an influential business leader said on Thursday, acknowledging that it could take a year to achieve.
Takeshi Niinami, chairman of business lobby Keizai Doyukai and who also heads Suntory Holdings, said the Bank of Japan "must normalize" monetary policy to help weed out incompetent firms and facilitate labor turnover toward growth industries.
The BOJ remains a dovish outlier amid a global wave of aggressive central bank policy tightening. Last month, it stuck to its negative interest rate policy targeting short-term interest rates at minus 0.1%.