BOJ Signals Inflation Trend Has Reached Target

The signal matters less as a confirmation of price data than as a shift in the policy framework: an inflation trend judged to be durably at target removes the core justification for continued ultra-loose settings, which have long anchored global funding conditions and, by extension, carry-trade positioning across risk assets including crypto. The read-through is indirect for digital assets, but a BOJ that no longer needs to defend an undershooting price path is a BOJ with more room to normalize. Whether that translates into actual policy movement, and how the yen and cross-asset volatility respond, is the open question.