Press Conference by Taro Aso, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and Minister of State for Financial Services
(Excerpt)
(Thursday, November 2, 2017, 3:17 pm to 3:24 pm)
[Opening remarks:]
Once again, I have been appointed Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, Minister of State for Financial Services, and Minister in charge of Overcoming Deflation. In accordance with instructions from the Prime Minister, I will be ensuring that we overcome deflation and achieve both economic revitalization and fiscal consolidation. I intend to conduct financial regulation and supervision with the aims of delivering sustainable growth for both companies and the economy and increasing the welfare of citizens through promoting the household’s stable asset formation.
[Questions and answers:]
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Q.
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I have a question about the realignment of regional banks. At a press conference yesterday, Japan Fair Trade Commission Chairman Kazuyuki Sugimoto said, with regard to the mergers of regional banks in Nagasaki and Niigata, that it was inappropriate to rely on monopolistic profits to maintain the regional financial system. He said that other merger approaches must be available if the goal is to strengthen companies. These remarks can also be interpreted as a constraint on the mergers of regional banks in Nagasaki and Niigata, so I’d like to hear your views.
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A.
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I’d like to refrain from commenting on opinions like that from our standpoint, at least with respect to those remarks. Having said that, with regard to the current situation of regional banks, population decline is occurring, and we are seeing an acceleration in the falling birthrate and aging population, so in that sense I think it’s extremely important that banks and other regional financial institutions remain sound in the future, and in that sense, without some degree of scale, banks are finding it difficult to survive, and this is nothing new. So I think we always have to consider the convenience of users, and with that in mind, we have to revitalize the regions. So I think that this is an issue that we are going to need to keep working on, taking various things like that into account.
