First, in a one person/one vote system, I very much doubt that a sufficiently stable majority could be relied upon to exist to vote, as a majority, for the entire future path of rates (and then to stick to it if conditions had not changed). And I am not convinced that communication would be aided by publishing a path made up of segments supported by majorities comprising different groups of members. In those circumstances, it would be hard to make sense of how individual statements related to the supposedly collective expected path. Second, any such statements would be conditional on a whole host of judgments about what was going on in the economy and about how the economy works. I doubt that, in the UK, our communication with the public and Parliament would be judged a success if we announced a path, only to have to explain that we had departed from it because conditioning assumptions A, B …. or X and Z had been invalidated by the passage of time. Getting across the conditionality might be hard, but also very important: there could be disquiet if the public felt that it had been misled. There is a premium, in our polity, of keeping the debate focused on the outlook for inflation. As I have said to the Select Committee, 28 I would not myself say “never”. I think we must learn from experience elsewhere. But that does not mean sitting on our hands.
Durmuş Yilmaz: Financial security and stability Speech by Mr Durmuş Yilmaz, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, at the forum “Measuring and Fostering the Progress of Societies: The OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy”, Istanbul, 28 June 2007. *  *  *  Dear guests, I would first like to welcome you all to Istanbul, the city where the two continents meet. And today it is so delightful to see that it is a meeting point for high level delegates from all the continents. In that regard, it is a great pleasure for me to be given the opportunity to share my views on financial stability and security with such a distinguished audience. Today, I would like to begin my speech by underlining the importance of financial stability, why and how we should keep an eye on the stability of the financial system, including the Turkish perspective. Finally, I will try to emphasize the interrelatedness between financial security and stability. Importance of financial stability… As a result of the liberalization and deregulation processes, financial markets became more integrated and underwent radical transformation, starting, in fact, with developed countries in the late 70’s and spreading to developing countries in the 80’s and 90’s. At the same period, capital movements were seen to have accelerated and reached to high levels. This, in turn, led to financial innovation and heavy use of sophisticated instruments.