Press Conference by Taro Aso, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and Minister of State for Financial Services

(Excerpt)

(Wednesday, December 24, 2014, 9:55 am to 10:13am)

[Questions and answers]

Q.

You’ve been implementing Abenomics for 729 days now, and during the election campaign there was a lot of talk about whether it needs to be modified. For example, the yen has fallen too far, so although energy prices are falling, the weak yen is serving to cancel out the benefits of that. And fiscal policy may be facing the problem of limited supply. There have been various problems. You have said that continuing to implement Abenomics is a task for the third Abe Cabinet, but Minister, do you not personally think that some aspects of Abenomics need to be changed?

A.

Basically, if we go with the three arrows, and I talk about monetary policy, the money supply has expanded considerably, through the efforts of the Bank of Japan. The problem is that we have yet to examine closely whether the old-fashioned way still exist, whereby loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by shinkin banks, regional banks, second-tier regional banks, and so on are made subject to real estate being provided as collateral, so SMEs may be finding it more difficult to fund their operations. More attention needs to be paid to that problem. And we’ve put a fair amount of effort over the last two years into creating an image as the “Financial Nurturing Agency,” but I think that we need to examine things a little more closely, that the institutions that are actually on the frontline, such as the shinkin banks, credit unions, second-tier regional banks, and so on respond to that and deal with things in that kind of way.

(End)

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