5 / 15  BIS central bankers' speeches  Although the Bank continued to provide accommodative financial conditions through measures such as an expansion of the Asset Purchase Program and strengthening of forward guidance, this did not result in a significant improvement in economic activity and prices. Thus, the Bank newly introduced an extremely powerful policy package in April 2013 — namely, QQE.
Under this framework, the Bank shifted the main operating target from interest rates to the monetary base, and incorporated all of the four approaches that I outlined earlier. First, it encouraged a decline in long-term interest rates more powerfully than before through large-scale JGB purchases of which the amount far exceeded that under the comprehensive monetary easing policy.