The Bank of Japan’s policy meeting is approaching, and the market is highly anticipating a rate hike, with the health of the governor becoming a market variable.

Mars Finance News: On June 11, as the Bank of Japan is set to hold a policy meeting from June 15 to 16, a sudden development has caused market expectations regarding communication to fluctuate. On June 10, the Bank of Japan announced that 74-year-old Governor Ueda Kazuo was urgently hospitalized due to a liver cyst infection and is expected to be unable to attend next week’s meeting, but will express his personal position through a written statement. Since the Bank of Japan established the current policy decision-making mechanism in 1998, there has been no case in which the governor missed a routine policy meeting.

It should be noted that current mainstream market expectations are pointing to a 25 basis-point rate hike, and the probability of this event on Polymarket has reached 98%. If this meeting raises interest rates as expected, then any hints regarding the pace of future rate hikes may become a key variable in the foreign exchange market at the press conference after the policy is released.

According to analysts cited by Reuters and other media, if Ueda Kazuo’s health issues persist, it could provide room for the prime minister to influence the future direction of the Bank of Japan’s policy, especially regarding the governor’s position—once a governor change occurs, the successor would need to be nominated by the prime minister.