When considering our policy options, Governing Council needed to bear in mind that our base case forecast omits a key consideration; namely, the government’s intention to introduce fiscal measures to stimulate the economy. Our convention is not to guess about BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  these things, but to incorporate actual announcements.
Suffice it to say that were we to incorporate a degree of new fiscal stimulus in this projection today the output gap would close sooner than in our base case, but how much sooner would depend on the scale and nature of the fiscal measures. It is fair to say, therefore, that our deliberations began with a bias toward further monetary easing.