BIS Review 71/2004  3  We perhaps need to look again at the process for considering, and reaching a conclusion about, the fundamental “design parameters” some of which I have touched on today. This is no small task, but if agreement could be reached on the fundamentals, these could be stated as clear principles in a preamble to any new standard, to guide the more detailed requirements. And it might enable the widely-held vision of a less detailed and prescriptive standard to be realised, to replace the hundreds of pages of complex rules. To address this, however, raises three questions: (i) On what is early consensus necessary? (ii) How should the transition be approached? And (iii) What does this mean in institutional terms? Early consensus Early agreement seems to me particularly important in three areas. The first is to review the conventional understanding on who the accounts are for, and clarify how the different interests of different stakeholders are to be met. The second is to agree where the standard should be placed along the spectrum between historic cost and fair value measurement. A particularly difficult conceptual question in this area is: precisely what economic meaning is there in so-called fair valuation of instruments in which (a) there is little or no secondary market, or (b) there is a market, but a clear intent to hold an instrument to maturity? Finally, the implications of any increase in measured volatility will need to be assessed.
In his presentation today, he presents a system for evaluating and ranking different policy alternatives, showing how Taylor diagrams can be used to evaluate whether one interest rate forecast results in lower volatility in inflation and the output gap than another. If a forecast results in inflation closer to target and a narrower output gap through the forecast period, this forecast is selected. On other occasions, the choice between two forecasts can be more problematic. The forecast that is selected will depend on preference and the considerations that are given weight. I completely agree with Lars Svensson that policymakers must rank the different policy alternatives based on their preferences. In some cases, policymakers may wish to keep the interest rate high while in others a low interest rate may be preferred. However, it is equally important to take account of preferences over time, i.e. having a system to check whether the preferences underlying the baseline scenario in one report are the same as those of the previous report. And once preferences have been formalised in a loss function, it is relatively simple to find the optimal interest rate path for a given model. The choice of path will then depend on policymakers’ preferences. A policymaker’s preferences may of course change over time, but I am in favour of basing the analysis on the same set of preferences as previously. This approach will contribute to consistency in communication over time. 1  Cf.