Mervyn King: The New Inflation Target Speech by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, at the annual Birmingham Forward/CBI business luncheon, Birmingham, 20 January 2004. *  *  *  I have always wanted to perform at Villa Park. Now is my chance. Economists at Villa Park are not as unusual a sight as you might think. It is not well known that John Maynard Keynes also came to Villa Park. In September 1913 Keynes was visiting Birmingham and decided to see the match of the day between the two top teams in the country - Aston Villa and Blackburn Rovers. On the following day, Keynes wrote to Duncan Grant1: “There has been some amusement here, but mixed up with a good deal of boredom. Birmingham has a very definite character. I went yesterday with 40,000 other people to one of the peak football matches. The scene was very much as I imagine the Coliseum. The ground is built on the same model - an immense oval rising all round tier above tier in about 50 rows so far as I could count. The crowd maintained a dull roar nearly all the time, rising into a frenzy of excitement and rage when the slightest thing happened. The match was between the two principal “league” teams of England. The local people were beaten by a team from Lancashire, who had, so I was told, ‘the best right wing in England, and the most expensive’”.
In Switzerland, this means that as long as the economic recovery remains on track, we should not postpone for too long the process of normalising monetary conditions. Otherwise, we would put medium term price stability at risk. 1/1