Communication between the ECB on the one hand and the financial markets and the general public on the other has - especially at the start of the single monetary policy - not always been without difficulties. However, it is clear that communication between the ECB and both the public and the financial markets has improved considerably over time.
So, too, has the public’s understanding of the ECB’s strategy. For example, some commentators initially confused the reference value with a monetary target and assumed that the ECB was pursuing a monetary targeting strategy, while others implied that it was pursuing an inflation targeting strategy on the basis of an inflation forecast or even a mixture of both. Such misinterpretations have since become rare.