Haruhiko Kuroda says "it will gradually become clear" that negative interest rates can save the world. I just hope the Bank of Japan head means sometime in the next eight years.
At the eight-month mark, Japan's embrace of the sub-zero world is failing even more spectacularly than in the eurozone, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. And it hasn't taken long to prove it, as savings rates for most countries running negative-rate policies swell to the highest level in at least 20 years. Kuroda's answer is the same as European Central Bank head Mario Draghi's: be patient. A better one would be to admit defeat, scrap this negative-interest-rate-policy silliness and treat the real problem.
What's that? Psychologically battered consumers from Paris to Tokyo to New York smelling the panic in central bankers' actions.