We need to do this in order to rebuild confidence and to ensure that we do not repeat the type of financial boom and bust that has characterized this cycle. Thank you very much for your kind attention, I would be happy to take questions. BIS Review 28/2009  7
The flipside of digital services is that more activities that were previously part of the market economy can now be produced at home. A person wanting to arrange a holiday, for example, no longer needs to visit or phone a travel agent, but can research and book the whole trip herself online. The sales of hotels and flights still contribute to GDP. But the work formerly done by the travel agent, which has now effectively been outsourced to the consumer, disappears. This also raises questions for how we measure productive activity. These examples highlight the difficulties of understanding how the economy is developing – let alone estimating its potential growth rate. To be sure, we should aim to rise to that challenge and update our statistics to capture such changes. But clearly, as policymakers, we also have to be humble about what can know. And in that context, imagining that we can reliably hold the output gap around zero is simply hubris. 2  See: Olivier Blanchard, Eugenio Cerutti and Lawrence Summers, Inflation and Activity – Two Explorations and their Monetary Policy Implications”, IMF Working Paper WP/15/230 (November 2015). 3  See: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), especially Chapter 8. 4  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/481452/ Bean_review__Interim_Report_web.pdf. 5  See Erik Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh, “The Attention Economy: Measuring the Value of Free Digital Services on the Internet”, Thirty Third International Conference on Information Systems (Orlando: 2012).