This is an important precondition to sustainable growth in employment and incomes. Most people can cope without too much difficulty with a bit of variation in inflation from year to year, but it is the medium-term uncertainty that is really damaging to planning. I hope that it is well understood that our framework allows for temporary deviations of inflation from the medium-term target.
In this regard, we have a degree of flexibility not available to some other central banks that have a singular focus on inflation. Some of these central banks have felt that given their mandates they had little choice but to take whatever measures were available to them to push inflation higher.