The public authority role means that we are at the end of a delegation chain. The people have elected a parliament which has legislated on the Riksbank’s objective and appointed the General Council of the Riksbank. The General Council in turn appoints the Executive Board with six members who are to make the monetary policy decisions. This type of delegation may be appropriate when political decisions risk leading to time horizons that are too short. This problem is dealt with in monetary policy by the Riksbank having a high degree of independence and a clear statutory task. Delegation may also be appropriate if there is a question of technically complicated activities. Monetary policy is such an activity. There are also many other authorities, for example, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate and the Swedish Civil Aviation Authority, who are responsible for technical issues that have considerable importance to society. Most people probably think that, for instance, the length of a runway at an airport or the design of the cooling system in a nuclear power station should be determined by experts and not through political voting. Some of the demands made of us on the basis of our role as authority are fairly obvious. We must, for instance, to the best of our ability try to meet the price stability target we have been allocated. We must also be able to explain in a good way to the general public why we act in the way we do.
Even now, four or five months into recovery, recession is out-Googling recovery by a factor of 15 to one, above its pre-Covid level. The prevailing popular narrative on the economy has remained recessionary. Chart 5: Ratio of Google Trends topic searches for the term recession vs economic recovery  Ratio of searches for recession:economic recovery  Economic growth  200 Monthly GDP  Q2 GDP  released showing growth  release  180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0  Sep-19 Oct-19 Nov-19 Dec-19 Jan-20 Feb-20 Mar-20 Apr-20 May-20 Jun-20  Jul-20 Aug-20  Source: Google Trends  A particularly revealing episode is associated with the notable spike in the pessimism ratio on the 12 August. This was when the Office for National Statistics published second quarter GDP figures for the UK. These showed a huge fall of over 20% in GDP, the largest quarterly fall on record by far. This, understandably, was one of the top three new stories on the day. Here are some of the headlines that accompanied it:  8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  8  Yet the irony is that the only news in this release was GDP growth for the month of June, the final month of the quarter. This saw an almost 9% rise in activity, by far the largest rise in any month ever and above market expectations. Yet negative media headlines outnumbered positives by many multiples. Positive economic news was media-filtered into an extreme negative event.