Bloomberg has a story with an ominous opening paragraph:
Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s stimulus policies are backfiring in the housing market, where mortgage rates are rising even as the central bank floods the financial system with cash.
Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! The next paragraph:
Fixed 35-year home-loan costs rose to 1.81 percent this month, the first increase since February and up from an all-time low of 1.8 percent in April, according to data compiled by the Japan Housing Finance Agency. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s monetary easing almost halved 30-year U.S. mortgage rates since 2008 to 3.35 percent on May 2.
Seriously? The case against Kuroda is that after declining since February, mortgage rates climbed a whole basis point? And Kuroda is expected to accomplish in a few months what took Bernanke five years? And I thought I could be a harsh critic of central bankers!
Hopefully this is just a typo; I can't seem to locate a time series of the 35-year mortgage rate in Japan. Otherwise, one might be tempted to conclude that the reporters were biased against Abenomics.
