“I think yield-curve control is entirely sustainable,” Haruhiko Kuroda said Wednesday, after the Bank of Japan held policy settings unchanged amid rampant speculation that December’s “shock” decision to widen the allowable range for 10-year bond yields presaged additional concessions to market vigilantes prior to the end of Kuroda’s term.

He appeared to suggest no such tweaks are forthcoming between now and April, when he steps down. That may be true, but an overhaul is now viewed as a foregone conclusion, so every meeting that passes without at least a nod to the inevitability of regime change is akin to delaying the inevitable. 10-year yields pushed up against the 0.5% ceiling ahead of the meeting before falling sharply when the bank stuck to the script.

The yen plunged. Although conditions are far more favorable for the currency now than they were six months ago (the Fed is downshifting, US yields are lower, energy prices are less onerous and so on), the BoJ’s commitment to buying ever more bonds to defend the yield ceiling is an albatross.

USDJPY eventually trimmed gains, but the knee-jerk reaction (a 2% dollar-yen surge) was indicative of the overhang from YCC. Headed into the meeting, the BoJ had purchased JPY13 trillion in bonds over just four days in defense of the 0.5% yield threshold.

At one point Wednesday, the drop in 10-year yields matched the intra-day decline seen when Kuroda cranked the money creation dial to “11” in 2013.

Tellingly, the BoJ’s new inflation forecasts showed no change in the median projection for 2023, when annual price growth (and here that’s CPI excluding fresh food) will be 1.6%. Excluding fresh food and energy, this year’s median projection was bumped up to 1.8%. 2024’s projections suggest the bank isn’t confident inflation will reach 2% sustainably, a contention shared by many economists, even as Japanese consumers grapple with price growth that’s twice that level.

The elephant in the room is wage growth, and although there’s been movement recently, most observers believe the BoJ’s goals on that front aren’t achievable, which in turn opens the door to persisting in accommodation in virtual perpetuity (because as everyone knows, if you do the same thing over and over and the results never change, the best thing to do is keep doing it, only with more prayers).

“Analysts see BoJ on borrowed time,” a Bloomberg bullet point read. I suppose that’s fine when you can just suppress borrowing costs forever.

The BoJ on Wednesday suggested it’ll take a kind of case-by-case approach to rates on loans made to commercial banks for bond purchases. Apparently, some of those loans might be doled out at negative rates. “I won’t rule out the possibility of negative rates being applied to the fund-supply operations,” Kuroda said.

And with that, he was off to Davos.