Starting from this material, the Board members endeavour to arrive at a joint view of economic developments and inflation. By and large, we follow the structure of Chapter 2 in the Report and start with international prospects. Our opinions naturally differ on some things, large as well as small, as can be seen, for example, from the published minutes of the meetings. But an effort has always been made to arrive at a joint view and in this we have generally succeeded. I want to underscore that this is a balancing act. It is important that different perspectives are compared and as many difficult questions as possible are discussed. But it is also desirable that we ultimately arrive at something of a consensus. In the longer run it would hardly be good for the Riksbank to publish six different inflation reports, which in a way would be the logical outcome of carrying the Board members’ individual responsibility to an extreme. This raises the issue of what the Inflation Report stands for. The Board’s decision that it represents a majority view enables us to compile a clear and consistent presentation. The Bank of England has a different procedure that aims to present different views in a single report. The material produced in the Monetary Policy Department is distributed simultaneously to all the Board members to make their conditions as similar as possible.
Stable money, stable prices: these are the very foundations of a well-functioning market economy. There is a strong economic case for price stability, which today is - again - widely accepted. However, the case for price stability goes beyond the purely economic sphere. Price stability, the ability to rely on stable money, is the basis for trust in the interaction among economic agents, trust in property rights, trust in society and trust in the future more generally. Trust in stable money is also the basis for a free society, the ability of people to take decisions and plan their future for themselves. This is particularly evident with respect to life-time savings for retirement, which is a topical issue at the moment in the context of discussions over a greater role for private pension schemes. Private provision of retirement savings crucially requires the trust of savers in the long-run stability of money. Conversely, a loss of such confidence inevitably leads to calls on the state to step in and provide for the future collectively. Inflation undermines trust in money and in property rights more generally. This mechanism was apparently recognised by Lenin who allegedly remarked that the “most effective way to destroy civil society is to destroy its money”. 3  BIS Review 96/2000  There is a saying that “peace is not everything, but without peace everything else comes to nothing”. I am tempted to say the same thing for price stability.