The Committee as a whole needs to explain its view of where the economy is heading. The Inflation Report has been the main vehicle for expressing the collective view of the Committee. Together with the minutes of the monthly meetings, it provides an explanation of past actions which should enable others to understand how we are likely to behave in the future. At the same time, the voting records of individual members of the MPC are in the public domain. That disclosure improves the quality of decisions, as well as the accountability of Committee members, because there is no better incentive to cast one’s vote for the policy most likely to hit the inflation target than the prospect of having to defend that voting record in public. Of course, all members of the MPC are well aware that there is no certainty about the precise level of interest rates which is desirable in any given month. That is why we discuss with each other at great length the appropriate course of action before each member makes up his or her own mind. For such a system to work it is crucial that MPC members give their best judgment and do not try to reach an artificial consensus. How, then, should we balance the need to give a clear view about how the Committee sees economic developments and the requirement of individual accountability? There have been two main criticisms of the MPC in this respect. First, that the MPC has been too open about differences within it.
As part of my revision, I studied the inflation rates since the Second World War for several different measures of inflation. They were all at or very close to 3% a year. No-one in Cambridge at that time – and certainly not the students that were to become part of the inflation generation – heeded the late Richard Kahn’s warning that creeping inflation was about to accelerate. The rest, as they say, is monetary history. I would like those of you revising for your final exams this month to be able to look back in thirty years time and recall that the year in which you graduated was when we finally laid to rest the idea that the UK was an inflation-prone economy. Inflation was the norm for most of my adult life. It should not be in yours. BIS Review 63/1999  8  Why then, you may ask, do we need to build a constituency for low inflation? There are two reasons. First, it is important that support for low inflation not wane as the experience of high and unstable inflation of the past recedes. It would be a counsel of despair to believe that the inflationary excesses of the recent past would have to be repeated in order to retain support for low inflation. Yet, in a recent survey of households in Germany, Robert Shiller2 found that support for stability was much higher among those who had experienced hyperinflation.