The Bank of Japan's September policy initiative to announce the purchase of some stocks from commercial banks has once again cast the spotlight on the Japanese economic malaise. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has since made clear that its initiative was not to be understood as further monetary easing or anti-deflationary policy. Instead, it claimed that it wished to help banks deal with their bad debts. This claim is not convincing, for if the BoJ had really been concerned with alleviating the bad-debt