A coda to my previous post, where I reported on some simulations presented in the Bank of England’s new blog. My final paragraph started: “The blog does not discuss the policy implications, but they are pretty obvious.” I went on to say what I thought the implications were. Tony Yates thinksthat maybe there was a hidden meaning in the sentence I wrote. The hidden meaning was: ‘see how subversive the new blog is: they are allowing staff to communicate that they think the MPC should be overshooting the target’.
When Tony first raised this possibility with me on twitter, I just had to laugh, for two reasons. The first is that I had never imagined what I wrote could be interpreted this way. I am an academic, not a journalist trying to gain kudos by embarrassing the Bank. I am interested in what policy should be, not what some Bank staff think it should be. The second is that Tony’s imagined interpretation of what I had written was a perfect illustration of the kind of old Bank thinking that used to make it such a closed institution.
This kind of thinking subjects each possible release of economic analysis, however technical, to the following test. Could you imagine a malevolent journalist taking this analysis and using it to infer something about what policy might be or what some people in the institution think policy should be? The imagined journalist could be both very knowledgeable and quite stupid. If the answer is yes for any combination of these things, the analysis should not be released.
Now Tony is the last person to support such an attitude, but by imagining I had some hidden meaning, and then putting his imagination into print, he just encourages the old way of thinking. As far as I can see some staff members published a piece of technical analysis, and left those reading it to draw any policy conclusions they wished. Now what on earth is wrong with that!
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