We Asked Whether the Hike Case Rests on Wages or the Yen. In 34 Opinions the Yen Appears Zero Times.
Yesterday this desk pre-registered a two-way test on the Bank of Japan's October Summary of Opinions: does any opinion argue for a near-term hike, and are wages the stated ground?
We have now read the issuer document in full. The first leg won — six of fifteen monetary-policy opinions press for faster movement toward neutral. The second lost: wages appear five times and all five sit in the Prices section, two of them dovish, with zero wage-based hike arguments. And the loss we pre-named — the currency instead of wages — also lost, because in thirty-four opinions the yen is not mentioned once. The character appears a single time, inside the word for "smoothly", in a bullet about ETF disposals. The hike case rests on underlying inflation at 2% three times, the neutral rate three times, financial conditions twice, corporate rate tolerance and economic resilience once each. The document also states no decision and no vote: a board that held at 1.25% produced six opinions arguing to move faster, and the two facts arrive in different documents on different days. Meanwhile the consumption print the board never saw landed eleven days after the meeting ended — household spending −6.8% against a 3.1% expected fall, 3.7 points light, a tenth straight decline, seasonally adjusted −2.8% against an expected +0.3%. Our own carried consensus said 3.0; it is 3.1, which is also the prior month's actual, so nothing in the row could tell us which field we had copied. US CPI is at 13:30 UTC with no headline year-on-year field, and the stored 0.3% is a rounding of about 0.29.