But it was only in 1994 that the Fed decided to make its interest rate decisions public in real time. Designed between 1994 and 1998, the European Central Bank (ECB) was born at the start of a new era for central banking. Two developments during this period raised the importance of communication.
First, the increasing independence of central banks made it more important to communicate with and be accountable to the public. Second, against a backdrop of liberalising financial markets, the effectiveness of monetary policy became more and more dependent on steering expectations of future interest rate policy.