Like the educational and Citizen Panel programmes, it has allowed the Bank to engage with an entirely new cohort of people with new perspectives on new issues. Establishing these initiatives as central planks of the Bank’s engagement strategy is one of things I am proudest about from my time at the Bank. I believe they hold the key to closing the twin deficits. The economy affects everyone and everyone affects the economy. Central banks’ actions also affect everyone. So the Bank needs to seek to engage everyone if it is to meet the needs of its stakeholders. Doing so is one of the most effective ways to ensure the Bank’s social contract with the public is not breached. To my mind, the revolution in central bank communication and engagement practices has been as great as with monetary and financial stability frameworks - and crucial in cementing the success of both. I have done my bit, leading the Bank’s outreach programmes and through 32 working papers, 75 published speeches, over 100 regional visits, around 150 published articles in books and academic journals, and many hundreds more unpublished speeches and schools talks. To say nothing of several spectacularly unsuccessful books. Looking ahead, the transparency revolution has yet to run its course. There is more the Bank can do to deepen and broaden its engagement with a wider audience. There is further for the Bank to go in harvesting the stories from this audience to inform its view of the economy.
Beyond this, we will probably continue to raise rates, but we may do so in a more flexible and possibly less rapid manner - "jumbo" rate hikes will not become a new habit. Since July, we have been making decisions on a meeting-by-meeting basis. A favourable condition to interrupt rate hikes would be clear signs of a turnaround in the core inflation trend, i.e. excluding energy and food. One word about the comparison with the US: on both sides of the Atlantic, inflation is too high. But it doesn't have the same nature: the energy component is higher in Europe; the demand one higher in the US, where the labour market is also tighter. Hence we don't need to raise rates at the same pace, nor to the same level. That said, signs of peaking inflation – headline and core – in the US last Thursday are good news for everyone, as the US has been ahead of the global inflation cycle, and the US monetary tightening has had strong spill overs on the rest of the world through the high level of the dollar. Central banks are thus playing their part in the fight against inflation, but let us not forget structural economic measures. "Beefing up" our productive capacity also has the potential to help reduce inflation in the longer term, in addition to increasing potential growth. This holds especially true when it comes to our ecological transformation, in order to decrease our dependency on fossil fuels.