17 17  Jul.17  1818  Jul.18  19 19  (*) As from January 2019 the line uses the new indexes with 2018=100 annual base, so they are not strictly comparable with past figures. Sources: Central Bank of Chile and National Statistics Institute (INE). 9  Figure 3 Selected CPI prices (indexes, January 2018=100)  Mobile phone services  101  Telecom package services  101 105  105  100  100 100  100  99  99  95  95  98  90  90  98 16  17  18  19  New cars  110  16  105  100  100  95  95 16  17  18  18  19  Air transport services  110 160  105  17  160  120  120  80  80  19  16  17  ----2013 basket  18  19  ----2018 basket  Source: National Statistics Institute (INE).
The pre-announced monthly cycle of meetings, regular quarterly Inflation Report forecasts, and set briefing routines, were very much part of the package. The goal of these new arrangements was to make the system understandable and predictable to outsiders. After a sharp burst of activity in the late 1990s, the processes and procedures surrounding monetary policy have now settled down. We still use much the same internal processes and means of communicating with the outside world as we did a decade ago. But the outside world has not stood still, in at least two respects. First, over time the MPC has established a track record of actions and communications which people have, as intended, learnt to parse with great precision. There is a cottage industry in interpreting its every utterance, in the light of its past behaviour, in order to predict its next actions. Any deviation from past behaviour is assumed to be deliberate and considered. A topical example is the market reaction to the latest interest rate rise. The formal position has always been that the MPC may change rates at any one of its policy meetings. And in the early days of the Committee that’s pretty close to what happened. But since 2001, as a matter of fact, rates have been much more likely to change in the months when we publish a new quarterly Inflation Report. That was why the January rate rise caused such surprise even though commentators were fully expecting a rate rise to accompany the February Inflation Report.