2 Those included -  Parliament, in legislation, enshrining the goal of price stability, and requiring the Bank to publish a quarterly report on the outlook for stability  -  the executive arm of government deciding the definition of price stability (2% CPI inflation target) and setting out requirements for the Bank to explain publicly what is going on if the target is missed on either side by more than 1pp  -  the Committee comprising four ‘external’ members as well as five internal (or ‘executive’) members. The external members were necessary to legitimise giving such an important function to the Bank. ‘One person/one vote’, with transparency, was a mechanism for attracting high-quality ‘externals’ and for ensuring that the introduction of ‘new blood’ made a difference – that it did let in ‘fresh air’ and bring useful expertise to the table. And, of course, the system of individual voting had to carry across to the ‘internals’ too. Indeed, as most studies show, there is no difference between internal and external members in our decision-taking. The burden of that rehearsal of some UK institutional history is this: that, in comparing central bank practices, we should not think of our various decision-taking structures solely as technical solutions to the shared technical problem of deciding a path for rates. Rather, our varying structures are efforts to solve that shared technical problem in the context of varying histories and social and political structures.
This means that, in addition to clarifying our own thoughts, we are up to a point in the business of persuasion. Ours is not a system of postal voting. It is a system of listening to and learning from each other. Second, with qualifications, some of the MPC’s communications are relatively more collective. In particular, our communications on a broadly shared ‘model’ of how the economy works, and our forecasts of the outlook for growth and inflation. In 1998, the (then) Committee published a paper on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism; and, in a 2007 paper to the Treasury Select Committee of Parliament, we described our view of material changes in the workings of the economy during the Committee’s first ten years. Both were agreed, collegiate-like documents, while not committing every member to every proposition. Much the same can be said of our quarterly forecasts and Inflation Reports, which play a central role in the MPC’s system. Our forecasts are the projections of the policymakers not the supporting analytical staff. It is striking that the ‘individualistic’ MPC publishes a common forecast, whereas the somewhat more-collegial FOMC has long published information (the central tendency and range) about the forecasts of its individual members (without the names). The FOMC’s approach allows the range of central projections to be transparent. It is  3  See Tucker, P M W, ‘Reflections on operating inflation targeting’, speech at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, July 2006, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin Q2 2006, pp 212-224.