Rather, the Bank estimate was developed in the spirit of trying to give some guidance to the members of the MPC on the relative weights that they should attach to the conflicting pictures painted by the Halifax and Nationwide indices. The house price index constructed by the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions is also helpful in this respect. That index has the advantage that it is constructed using a more complete method for adjusting for the mix of houses transacted than the Bank estimate, but it is based on only a small sample - approximately 5% - of mortgage-backed transactions. The Bank estimate suggests that house prices increased by 9.0% in the year to 1997 Q4, compared with 6.9% measured by Halifax and 12.9% by Nationwide. The Bank estimate is broadly consistent with the DETR index, which shows a 7.9% increase over the same period. But further work is required on this issue which is of importance to us all. “Divided we stand, united we fall” That brings me to the Monetary Policy Committee and the prospect for interest rates. The transparency of the new process means that the debate about monetary policy within the MPC is explained clearly to the world at large. Hence the reasons why monetary policy is so finely balanced are, I believe, now widely understood. But it is not just the policy debate which is now more transparent. The voting record of each individual member of the MPC is in the public domain.
Mugur Isărescu: Developments in the Romanian economy since 2008 Speech by Mr Mugur Isărescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania, at the “Romania Investors Days” conference, Bucharest, 16 June 2015. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to witness the growing interest the investors’ community is showing towards the Romanian economy. Since this is the first reverse roadshow focused on Romania, I hope it will prove fruitful for all parties involved and that it will be followed by other similar events. In my address today, I intend to briefly touch on the most relevant developments in the Romanian economy and I guess you will agree with me that we have come a long way since the beginning of the crisis. Probably the most synthetic assessment of the transformation is given by the fact that, at the onset of the crisis, Romania fell short of all four Maastricht criteria – inflation, long-term interest rates, public deficit and debt, exchange rate stability –, but now they are all fully met. Up to 2008, Romania was going through a period of fast economic growth (in excess of 7 percent per year, on average), fuelled by large capital inflows and the strongly pro-cyclical stance of the fiscal policy, especially in the last two years before the onset of the crisis.