The Bank of Japan failed to attract enough offers Wednesday in two rounds of short-term bill-buying aimed at injecting liquidity into the money market.
At 10:10 a.m., the central bank notified the money market it would purchase 800 billion yen in short-term government bills through resale agreements. However, it received offers to sell only 716.6 billion yen, BOJ officials said.
It was the first time the BOJ has failed to inject a planned amount of liquidity into the money market since March, when it adopted a strategy of quantitative easing to push short-term interest rates to virtually zero.