It will also give us the most important public platform to explain and defend our decisions, which sooner or later will prove unpopular. Unlikely as it may now seem, there will come a day when much of the public, businesses and banks find themselves on the same side, united in their opposition to the FPC taking away the Punchbowl before the party gets totally out of control. But the FPC will not be like the MPC in all respects. In contrast to monetary policy decisions, at least as practiced in the UK where we decide via individual votes, we will aim to reach decisions by consensus (although there will be provision for voting). That is essentially because of the wide range of issues the FPC will consider and the range of instruments potentially under our control. Another contrast with monetary policy is that, in some respects, we are entering unchartered territory for a developed economy. We will all – policymakers, bankers, investors, commentators, politicians – be learning about how, for example, varying capital, liquidity or collateral requirements is transmitted into the credit markets and the economy more widely. I therefore expect us to publish papers on how we approach our task and on the underlying economics. And, through the Remit process I described earlier, the government will be able to adapt the regime at the edges as we all learn. And we will need to learn, sometimes from mistakes or missed opportunities.
See also the Bank’s paper: “The role of macroprudential policy: A discussion paper”, November 2009. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The benchmark instrument, in the sense that it will definitely exist, will be the countercyclical buffer (CCB) in the Basel 3 Capital Accord. In the UK, it will be the FPC that decides whether to switch off the semi-automatic application of the CCB when triggered by the ratio of credit to GDP and other indicators exceeding certain thresholds. (It is not altogether clear, by the way, who will have that responsibility in other countries; the function requires a system-wide perspective and a macroeconomic capability and so is not exclusively in the domain of microprudential regulators.) Beyond the one instrument agreed internationally so far, the UK government is also considering whether to give the FPC a variety of other instruments. These include varying liquidity requirements; and varying capital requirements against specific types of exposure (“risk weights”) and/or minimum haircuts for specific types of secured lending, whether financing hedge funds etc or Loan-To-Value ratios for property-related lending. The availability of such targeted instruments might be especially useful where the FPC wished to mitigate risks from overexuberance and collective imprudence in lending to a particular sector without necessarily affecting credit conditions more generally. Targeting a specific area of business might also sometimes help to resolve a collective action problem sustaining a bubble if enough lenders themselves thought risk was being underpriced.