At his first Policy Board meeting after becoming governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda left no one in doubt about his intention to pursue an ultra-loose monetary policy.

That was on April 4, 2013.

Ten years later, the minutes of Policy Board meetings between January and June of that year have just come to light. They were released by the BOJ on July 31.

“I believe there is a need to conduct monetary easing on a scale that is vastly different from the past in terms of both quantity and quality,” Kuroda said at the time.

“We will do everything we can for that purpose, which means that we will not introduce measures in a piecemeal manner.”

Kuroda was named BOJ governor the previous month by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The central bank’s monetary easing policy would serve as the pillar of the “Abenomics” package of measures intended to pull the economy out of a deflationary spiral.

Other participants at the April 4, 2013, meeting quickly added their supporting comments.

“The scale of the measures to strengthen monetary easing should be so overwhelming as to convey the feeling to the market that everything has been implemented,” said Takehiro Sato, who joined the Policy Board after working as a private-sector economist.

“It will be important for this bank to have the market believe that there is no way for it to implement a gradual monetary easing expansion policy in the future,” he said.

Deputy Governor Hiroshi Nakaso waded in by saying the scale of the monetary figure should be a bold one that would leave the market not expecting any more.

At a news conference following that Policy Board meeting, Kuroda held up a panel to explain the central bank’s goals and the number 2 was everywhere.

“We will double the volume of funds flowing into the market and achieve a 2-percent increase in consumer prices within two years or so,” Kuroda said.

That marked the start of an unprecedented increase in measures taken by the BOJ, which included massive purchases of not only government bonds, but also risky financial assets known as exchange-traded funds.

Including a two-year period for achieving the target was one way for Kuroda to demonstrate a clean break from his predecessor, Masaaki Shirakawa.

Abe led the Liberal Democratic Party to a landslide victory in the December 2012 Lower House election, heralding the start of his second stint as prime minister. Abe made it his goal to turn the stagnant economy around.

Many heavyweights in the administration came to feel the BOJ was standing in their way.

When the government and BOJ agreed in January 2013 to release a joint statement, the 2-percent inflation goal was included. But Shirakawa spoke against setting any kind of deadline for achieving the target on grounds the central bank should not be held solely responsible since the government also had to implement measures to strengthen economic growth potential.

The joint statement only said the inflation target would be met “as soon as possible.”

But the minutes show that three months later it was Kuroda himself who raised the two-year period to achieve the target.

The minutes from that first Policy Board meeting also show that the participants were not 100 percent confident the measures would work, and that some fretted about possible side effects.

Economist Sayuri Shirai noted that a consensus had not emerged over the effectiveness of monetary easing, and some analysis pointed out that the scale had little effect.

Despite throwing his support behind Kuroda’s call for bold measures, Sato added, “We must be prepared to face the reality that this policy also carries a sense of it being a major gamble.”

Kuroda surmised it would usher in a change in the expectations held by people about moving out of the deflationary spiral.

His words came with a caveat, though.

“Unless there are actual effects on the transmission mechanism that leads to improvements in the real economy, there is concern that those expectations could end up being nothing more than expectations.”

Kuroda, however, never raised such concerns in a public venue such as news conferences.

Over the 10 years Kuroda was governor, the BOJ would tinker with the content of its monetary easing policy, including a negative interest rate and implementing a yield curve control to keep long-term interest rates down.

But despite that long period of ultra-loose monetary policy, the 2-percent inflation rate target was never attained.

(This article was written by Kyosuke Yamamoto and Shimpei Doi.)