The BoJ offers a cautionary tale for the West. It has been largely passive for 20 years, dabbling on the margins, buying bonds on short maturities from banks in a way that does little to revive broad money supply. “All they did was to expand reserves, but that is never going to make any difference. They created a straw man to then argue that quantitative easing does not work,” said Prof Werner, the man who coined the term QE in the early 1990s and later wrote Princes of the Yen.