The whole point of allowing monetary policy decisions to be made by a group of people and not one  BIS Review 134/2010  5  individual can be summarised in the expression “many heads are better than one”. And this would not apply if we all thought in the same way, if we were all clones. Then one single decision-maker would be sufficient. It may be worth pointing out that the fact that we have been publishing our own forecast for the repo rate for a few years now has probably meant that it becomes more noticeable when we disagree. The repo rate path makes it necessary to have a deeper and more long-term discussion than if we were just making a decision on whether or not the current repo rate should be changed. My impression is that the repo rate path has increased the quality of the monetary policy discussion both internally and outside of the Riksbank. But it also means that, to put it simply, we have more to disagree on. The fact that members of a monetary policy committee have different backgrounds, experiences and knowledge means that they approach an interest rate decision from slightly different directions, and they analyse and argue in slightly different ways. These differences do make demands that one must find some form of “common denominator” in the monetary policy discussion so that members do not talk at cross-purposes.
CPI inflation was forecast to increase quickly next year, mainly as a result of mortgage rates rising due to the repo rate increases. CPI inflation was expected to temporarily overshoot the inflation target in 2012 and 2013, but to be around the 2 per cent target in the longer run when the repo rate has reached more normal levels. The majority of the Executive Board members made the assessment that it was appropriate to continue the process of normalizing monetary policy that had begun in the summer. The repo rate was raised to 0.75 per cent and the repo rate path was held unchanged from June. This is roughly the picture we painted in the Monetary Policy Update published in September. The statistics received recently have continued to point towards a rapid recovery in Sweden. The GDP outcome for the second quarter has been revised up relatively substantially compared with the preliminary outcome, and expressed as an annual percentage change amounts to 4.6 per cent. The National Institute of Economic Research’s economic tendency survey points to the mood among households and companies being much stronger than normal, and the indicator is now only marginally lower than the peak listing from 2000. New international statistics present a mixed picture. How the new information will be taken into account is something we will return to at our next monetary policy meeting.