Looking back at the period from the early 1990s to the present, Japan has experienced the bursting of the domestic bubble economy, the Asian Financial Crisis and the financial system crisis in Japan, and the Great Recession caused by the Global Financial  1  This article forms part of joint research with Hamada Koichi (Yale University) and was written solely by Sakurai Makoto and Kimata Tomonori.
We are paying interest on excess reserves, which we can use to help provide a floor for the federal funds rate, as it does for other central banks, even if declines in lending or open market operations are not sufficient to bring reserves down to the desired level.