BOJ WEIGHS FASTER ETF SALES FOR TAX CUT

A senior lawmaker from Japan's ruling LDP has floated speeding up Bank of Japan sales of its ETF stockpile to help fund Prime Minister Takaichi's food tax cut. The BOJ holds 37 trillion yen in ETFs built up over 13 years, but is only unwinding them at 330 billion yen a year, a pace that would take roughly a century to clear the stockpile. Takaichi's cut, which drops the food sales tax from 8% to 1% for two years, carries an estimated 5 trillion yen annual shortfall she has pledged not to cover with fresh debt. Any shift in BOJ policy would ripple through Japanese equities tracked by $EWJ.