But this episode does highlight something we have been concerned about for some time – the importance of the resilience of the retail payments system. There are effectively two parts to this – the resilience of the shared infrastructure such as the payment card message and switching infrastructure, and the resilience of financial institutions' own systems.
For instance, the Fed and the ECB have in recent years frequently provided fairly direct indications about future interest-rate decisions in their official statements. We, in the RBI, have also started giving forward guidance since September 2010. However, there are several challenges. It is not easy to communicate clearly on a single objective.