Less than a decade ago, for example, the FOMC did not  BIS Review 63/2002  1  explicitly announce its policy decisions. Indeed, through much of the 1980s and early 1990s, the FOMC "signaled" its policy intentions to the market indirectly through a process involving technical distinctions among particular types of open market operations.
In retrospect, while this procedure helped to support a cottage industry of Wall Street Fedwatchers, it increasingly came to be seen by the public and the Federal Reserve as unnecessary and even counterproductive. As a result, in 1994, the FOMC began explicitly announcing its policy decisions.