This means focusing on what is heard rather than what is said: we cannot merely “publish and go”. As Tiff Macklem, my Canadian colleague, says “Public communications should be in plain language and free of jargon. We should speak as public servants and peers, not as oracles delivering messages from an ivory tower.”x And effective speaking also requires active listening. At the start of next year, consistent with the ECB endeavours, we will host a number of “Banque de France listens” events in all regions to hear what French citizens and SMEs think about inflation and monetary policy. We will then adjust our communication depending on what we hear. Let me elaborate on the economic stakes of this communication. Our inflation targeting policy will be significantly more efficient if economic agents, be they households or businesses, do actually understand it, accept it and believe it. Hence it should be seen as clear, legitimate and credible. I insisted earlier on clarification (question 2), let me now conclude with legitimacy and credibility. One of the most difficult challenges for a central bank with a price stability mandate is how to explain a positive inflation objective. The general public often does not understand why a central bank would deliberately try to increase inflation. We need to explain better that although our price stability objective is  Page 9 sur 10  defined in terms of HICP inflation, we are actually seeking a general average increase in all nominal variables, including wages and nominal GDP.
Such an exercise is essentially identical to the common practice of constructing Taylor rules for monetary policy, as in Chart 2. Chart 4 draws the macro-prudential policy-implied path of US bank capital ratios. In deference to the architect of modern theories of credit-induced instability, let us call this the “Minsky rule” [Minsky, 1986]. The path of the Minsky rule is, in many respects, the mirrorimage of the Taylor rule. It suggests that hypothetical US banks’ capital ratios would have been systemically and significantly tighter than their actual path between 2000 and 2009. In  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  other words, a tight macro-prudential stance would have counteracted the effects of a loose monetary policy stance. Although it is impossible to know for certain, it seems plausible that having this extra degree of policy freedom would have helped stabilise the US economy and financial system. A tighter bank capital regime would have tended to slow pre-crisis credit growth, thus constraining the boom. And more capital in the US banking system would have helped protect the wider economy from the credit crunch that followed the bust. In short, the boombust cycles in US credit and GDP would have plausibly been somewhat less severe had US policy been ambidextrous. The euro-zone crisis As a second historical example, consider the behaviour of some euro-zone crisis countries. In the run-up to monetary union, monetary policy was loosened significantly in a number of the peripheral European countries whose interest rates converged on core euro-area countries.