This means focusing on what is heard rather than what is said: we cannot merely “publish and go”. As Tiff Macklem, my Canadian colleague, says “Public communications should be in plain language and free of jargon. We should speak as public servants and peers, not as oracles delivering messages from an ivory tower.”x And effective speaking also requires active listening. At the start of next year, consistent with the ECB endeavours, we will host a number of “Banque de France listens” events in all regions to hear what French citizens and SMEs think about inflation and monetary policy. We will then adjust our communication depending on what we hear. Let me elaborate on the economic stakes of this communication. Our inflation targeting policy will be significantly more efficient if economic agents, be they households or businesses, do actually understand it, accept it and believe it. Hence it should be seen as clear, legitimate and credible. I insisted earlier on clarification (question 2), let me now conclude with legitimacy and credibility. One of the most difficult challenges for a central bank with a price stability mandate is how to explain a positive inflation objective. The general public often does not understand why a central bank would deliberately try to increase inflation. We need to explain better that although our price stability objective is  Page 9 sur 10  defined in terms of HICP inflation, we are actually seeking a general average increase in all nominal variables, including wages and nominal GDP.
In our discussion to come, I believe we could study two types of aggregates:  Page 7 sur 10   Financial aggregates, from the perspective of financial stability, and potentially looking more closely at the assets of financial institutions including non-banks (such as their provision of credit in the broadest sense) rather than at their liabilities only (including money, as in the past).  Other economic aggregates, starting with nominal GDP, which has the virtue of combining real growth and prices – two variables that statisticians sometimes have difficulties separating in our measures. But also employment and income distribution, which respond to the demands of the Treaties as well as to the expectations of the public. Allow me some remarks on the substance of these “secondary” objectives. To achieve financial stability, in an ideal world, we would have a box of macroprudential tools that could maintain financial stability whatever the monetary policy stance. However, in practice our set of macroprudential tools is comparatively limited. We need a monetary policy strategy that reflects this reality. We should go beyond the old debate of “separation principle” versus “ leaning against the wind”. I advocate a median way, which we could call “coordinated” or “integrated”.viii We have now a range of unconventional monetary instruments and our objective should be to pick the right combination that delivers the necessary accommodative monetary stance while minimizing of adverse side-effects on financial stability.