Haruhiko Kuroda

Haruhiko Kuroda served as Governor of the Bank of Japan from 2013 to 2023, implementing the most radical monetary policy experiment in central bank history. Working within Shinzo Abe's Abenomics framework, Kuroda launched "Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing" (QQE) — buying Japanese government bonds on an unprecedented scale — and later introduced negative interest rates and Yield Curve Control (YCC), which aimed to pin 10-year JGB yields near zero. The BOJ also became the first major central bank to purchase equity ETFs as a monetary policy tool, making it one of the largest shareholders in Japanese companies. His decade-long experiment with extreme monetary accommodation fundamentally changed how central banks think about the limits of unconventional policy. His successor Kazuo Ueda inherited the complex task of unwinding these extraordinary positions without destabilizing Japanese bond and equity markets.