Part of the reason is that they want to find a better place to stand against the constant pressures that arise from many sources - almost irrespective of economic conditions - for easier money and lower interest rates.22 From today’s perspective, explicit inflation targets might seem like an obvious alternative, but price stability had not yet been widely accepted as the pre-eminent objective of monetary policy.
Graham Towers, James Coyne, Louis Rasminsky and Gerald Bouey had extolled the virtues of price stability and had regarded it as one of the Bank’s most important objectives. But it had never been defined and the extent of the Bank’s commitment to achieving it was not always clear. The major preoccupation of the 1970s and early 1980s had been to “get inflation down”.