The need to achieve such a balance leads directly to the question of how the Committee should communicate its thoughts. The minutes of the MPC meetings, now released only 13 days after the decision itself, provide a detailed explanation of the issues that confronted the Committee and the arguments that were made during the meeting. They also contain the votes of individual members. The Committee has discussed, but rejected, the proposition that the minutes should contain individual paragraphs summarising the views of each member in turn. The reason is that such a procedure would alter the nature of our meetings quite radically. At present, they are a free-flowing discussion in which members discuss propositions and counter propositions in a spirit of mutual enquiry rather than an exchange of fixed and conflicting views. Discussion focuses on the relative merits of different possible explanations for the current state of the economy. If each member faced a deadline by which they had to produce a polished paragraph summarising their views, members would enter the meeting with such a paragraph in draft form and the spontaneity of the discussion would be lost. BIS Review 34/2002  5  For the same reason, it is not clear that the publication of transcripts of meetings enhances transparency. The Federal Reserve provides a useful case study. Prior to 1994, members of the FOMC were largely unaware that monetary policy discussions were being transcribed verbatim from audio recordings of the meetings.
And a large number could fail simultaneously if they take on correlated risks, as was the case in the US Savings and Loans crisis in the 1980s. Something else might be lost: banking relies on information. Large, multinational banks can use their existing customer knowledge to offer a customer services across the globe and across different business lines. This allows information to flow freely across borders and products and supports international trade and investment. I think it is possible to have a world in which large banks can fail in an orderly way – without the contagion and damage to the economy that in the past has forced the taxpayer to come in and absorb losses. But there is no single, silver bullet to achieve that; rather it requires the application of a comprehensive set of policy and powers. It requires a major change in the regulatory landscape and the transition will be difficult. Progress on resolution The good news is that there has been very substantial progress towards this new world. In the UK certainly we are now in a much stronger position in terms of dealing with bank failures  5  See Morgan and Stiroh (2005). 6  The FDIC had injected a total of $ as subordinated debt and equity into Continental Illinois (around $ in 2009 money). This compares to at least $ (contingent) capital injections into RBS (using 2009 exchange rates). 7  See Independent Commission on Banking (2011).