Kuroda Hails Recovery from 2008 Financial Crisis before Anniv.

September 4, 2018

Tokyo- Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said Monday that global financial markets have recovered from the financial crisis triggered by the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in mid-September 2008.

Global markets have since faced "various negative political and economic shocks such as the European debt problem in the first half of the 2010s," Kuroda noted in a speech at a symposium to mark the 30th birthday of Japanese stock index futures.

Despite the shocks, however, financial markets "have rebounded to precrisis levels" on the back of "the recovery of the global economy and solid corporate performance," Kuroda stressed.

The BOJ chief welcomed the increased use of futures trading for asset management, as this "provides households with more options for portfolio selection."

Meanwhile, Kuroda expressed concern about market turbulence caused by speculative trading. "Prices might cease to appropriately reflect the fundamentals behind the transactions" if the presence of a particular investor type expands so much as to impair the diversity of market participants, he warned.

Kuroda underscored the importance of "an increasingly wider range of investors and greater investor diversity." Jiji Press