To reach that wider audience, to close those trust and understanding deficits, central banks will need new tools and techniques. A New Frontier for Central Bank Engagement  Which tools and techniques? Were this simply a case of producing more, trust and understanding problems would have been long since solved. It is not. As philosopher Onora O’Neill has argued, simply adding to reporting does little for accountability and trust-building. 63  If reports are mostly unread or unreadable,  smothering people in more words and numbers could even detract from trust and accountability. In one sense, this is not a new point. Claude Shannon, the grandfather of information theory, did not define information by words or digits. Instead he defined it by whether uncertainty was reduced on the part of the receiver. 64  If receivers are overwhelmed by the depth, discouraged by the density and bamboozled by the  complexity, reporting can be disinformation on Shannon’s criterion. For a chunk of society, the very volume of reporting may be increasing uncertainty and impairing information, understanding and trust. Even the term “central bank communication” – a mainstay of central banking and a centrepiece of academic studies of central banks – may fail as a description of what is these days required to build trust and improve understanding. The quest to improve communications makes sense. But it has more than a hint of better sermons to the assembled congregation, enhanced education of an inattentive audience, a smoothlyswinging one-way door. Communication means mouths.
13 While monetary and financial stability policies are often seen as the fulcrum of central banks, they do not fully define their responsibilities. A survey by the Bank of International Settlements identified a further 16 responsibilities undertaken by at least some central banks (BIS, 2009). 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  accompaniment to increased central bank responsibilities and autonomy. With increased delegated powers came increased societal responsibilities to explain how those powers were being discharged. This shift in transparency practices took time. In 1981, Karl Brunner was still speaking about the “mystique” of central banking. 14  In the early 1990s, “mystique” was still the one-word advice offered by one prominent  central bank governor (Paul Volcker) to another (Mervyn King). 15  For most of their history, opacity has been  deeply ingrained in central banks’ psyche. And for much the greater part of its history, the Bank of England was at the forefront of that opacity agenda. For its first three centuries, the Bank appears to have kept its public utterances to a minimum. It was effectively mute. The prevailing ethos was well-captured by the job description provided to the official who became, in effect, the Bank’s first press officer: “keep the Bank out of the press and the press out of the Bank”. 16  The Bank was good to its word. During the period 1920 to 1945, the Bank’s communications strategy was far from expansive.