A Little More Conversation
A Little Less Action
Speech given by
Andrew G Haldane, Chief Economist, Bank of England
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy Conference
31 March 2017
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy
Committee. I would like to thank Shiv Chowla, Jeremy Franklin, Jonathan Fullwood, Chloe Gilbert,
Leanne Leahy, Michael McLeay, Michael McMahon, Sam McPhilemy, Chris Peacock and
Paul Robinson for their help in preparing this text. I would like to thank Mike Anson, Tom Belsham,
James Benford, Rachel Botsman, Nida Broughton, Kristin Forbes, Keir Haldane, John Lewis,
Clare Macallan, Mike Peacock and Eryk Walczak for comments and contributions.
It is a great pleasure to be here at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco conference on
"Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy". I am grateful to my old friend John Williams, President of the
San Francisco Fed, for the invitation. And for one night only, John, where better to channel my inner-Elvis.1
Back in 2004, Benoit Mandelbrot observed: "So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but
to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly
men, the central
bankers".2 -
You could quibble with the detail here a few central bankers these days are women and a few
are not old. But the general sentiment is not one which would be entirely out of place today.
It is not difficult to see why. The profile of central banks may never have been higher than today.
The responsibilities of central banks may never have been greater than today. And the actions taken by
central banks may never have been larger or as far-reaching as today. It is no coincidence that they have
recently been described, variously and colourfully, as "masters of the universe" and "the only game in town".3
At the same time, central banks have faced mounting criticism, and some mistrust, of their actions,
responsibilities and influence, at least in some quarters. Some have suggested tweaking, perhaps even
reversing, central banks' degree of operational independence over monetary policy.4
Others have suggested
constraining, perhaps even removing, central banks' degree of
discretion over monetary policy.5
This story has all the hallmarks of a Charles Dickens novel. Depending on who you follow on Twitter, for
central banks it is the best of times and the worst of times; it is an age of wisdom and an age of foolishness;
it is an epoch of belief and an epoch of incredulity. A happy ending to this story is by no means assured.
These views may be polarised, perhaps even caricatured. But they matter. Trust is the lifeblood of all things
monetary and financial, including central banks. And incredulity is Kryptonite for central banking Supermen
(and the odd Superwoman), rendering ineffective their policies and unaccountable their actions. Building
trust and legitimacy is among the most pressing issues facing central banks today.
-
Tonight, I want to explore one avenue for doing so rethinking how and with whom central banks engage.
There has been a revolution in central bank communications over recent years, with much wider and deeper
engagement with society.6 That has been essential in building central bank trust and credibility during good
times and protecting central bank legitimacy and independence during bad.
But two recent developments mean that central banks' engagement strategies may need to be widened and
deepened. First, the global financial crisis has dealt a trust-busting blow to many institutions, including
1
The title of the Elvis song is, of course, A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action (Please). Elvis was not a central banker.
2
Mandelbrot and Hudson (2004).
3
For example, Sentance (2015) and El-Erian (2015). See also Carney (2016).
4
macroeconomists, only 45% disagreed with the statement that "central
In a recent CFM-CEPR survey of Europe-based bank
independence in the Eurozone and the UK will decline over the next 48 months" (den Haan
et al, 2017).
5
See House Bill 3189 (2015).
6
See Warsh (2014) and Blinder et al (2017).
2
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches
central banks. Second, the way trust is built has been fundamentally reconfigured. Where once trust was
anonymised, institutionalised and centralised, today it is increasingly personalised, socialised and distributed.
Facing these new constraints, the challenge for central banks is to rebuild trust among a wider set of societal
stakeholders, more distrustful and diffuse than ever previously, using a set of trust-building technologies, less
well-understood than those used previously. As they have through their history, central banks will need to
adapt their customs and practices to these new social norms and technological possibilities.7
This is a big agenda. It is not one remotely unique to central banks. And it is not one I could remotely do
justice to tonight. Nonetheless, given the policy weight these days being placed on central banks' shoulders,
and the changing social and technological landscape facing them, it is probably as good a time as any to
begin exploring these new frontiers of central bank engagement.
Those new frontiers include communicating in simpler, narrative language that engages a wider audience
using localised, personalised messaging; finding new ways to engage with cohorts of society currently out of
-
reach, listening as often as talking; and using new technologies nudging and polling, naming and gaming
-
to better understand the views and behaviours of wider society. For central banks, this is a brave new
world.
The Rising Tide of Central Banking
Let me start by looking backwards. The 20th century may yet be seen by monetary historians as the one
when central banking came of age. At its start, there were fewer than 20 recognisably "central banks"
operating globally (Chart 1). Their responsibilities were typically heavily circumscribed by custom and
practice, by law or by the state. In the Bank of England's case, it was all three.
In these early days, the role of central banks was often to act as an operational arm of government: buying
and selling foreign exchange to preserve a currency peg; distributing central bank liquidity to financial
institutions, in normal and crisis times; serving as banker to the government and to commercial banks; and
issuing banknotes to the public to serve as the ultimate medium of exchange.8
As the 20th century unfolded, central bank numbers swelled. By its mid-point, they had risen more than
twofold, to around 60. By its end, they had risen a further threefold to not far off 200. Today, there are
roughly as many central banks as there are countries in the world.
Some of this ascent was simply the arithmetic consequence of a rising number of independent nation states.
But that is not the whole story. The fraction of nation states with a central bank rose from around
7
My friend and former colleague Minouche Shafik recently made many of these points in her final speech as Deputy Governor (Shafik,
2017).
8
Capie et al (1994).
one-quarter at the start of the 20th century to close to one by its end. In other words, during the course of the
20th century central banks came to be seen as an essential building block of the nation state.9
Accompanying this rise in the number of central banks through the 20th century was a rise, albeit not a
straight line rise, in their stock of responsibilities. Prominent among these was responsibility for setting
monetary policy. Latterly, this has gone by the name central bank operational "independence".
Even the word "independence" needs careful interpretation. As international practice has shown, there are
various shades of independence, depending on who sets the objectives and instruments of monetary policy
and how policy decision-makers are appointed and held to account. Indeed, there is now a small cottage
industry measuring these various dimensions of central bank independence.10
Nevertheless, on most metrics central bank independence in the setting of monetary policy has risen
decades. Until the 1980s, the number of recognisably "independent"
secularly and sharply over the past few
central banks was relatively modest. On one often-used measure, as recently as 1981 there were still fewer
than 50 independent central banks globally.11
In the period since, the fraction of central banks with operational independence in the setting of monetary
policy has sky-rocketed, rising from around a half in the 1980s to around 85% today (Chart 2). In a
generation, operational independence has gone from nice-to-have to have-to-have. It has become an
international norm, a statement of best institutional practice.
This rising tide of responsibilities is not confined to monetary policy. Around 80% of central banks have
some role in setting new macro-prudential tools.12 The Bank of England is among the over 50% of central
banks fully in charge of doing so. In the US, responsibility is shared across agencies, including the Fed. In
the European Union, responsibility is also spread across agencies, including a number of central banks.
In the run-up to the financial crisis, micro-prudential policy was increasingly located outside central banks.
Since the crisis, however, that trend has reversed (Chart 3). The ECB has assumed responsibility for
supervising the euro area's largest banks. The Federal Reserve's supervisory responsibilities have been
expanded and enhanced. And in the UK, micro-prudential supervision has returned to the Bank.13
The most recent chapter in central banks' evolutionary history has been increased openness
and
transparency about their actions, monetary, macro- and micro-prudential. This shift was a natural
9
Consistent with that, the historical evidence suggests that institutions, such as central banks, are essential elements of statecraft
(Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012).
10
See for example, Cukierman et al (1992), Grilli et al (1991), Crowe and Meade (2007), Arnone et al (2006), Dincer and Eichengreen
(2014), Bodea and Hicks (2015) and Garriga (2016).
11
The Cukierman et al (1992) index, updated and expanded by Garriga (2016).
12
et al et al
Claessens (2016), discussed in Blinder (2017).
13
While monetary and financial stability policies are often seen as the fulcrum of central banks, they do not fully define their
responsibilities. A survey by the Bank of International Settlements identified a further 16 responsibilities undertaken by at least some
central banks (BIS, 2009).
accompaniment to increased central bank responsibilities and autonomy. With increased delegated powers
came increased societal responsibilities to explain how those powers were being discharged.
This shift in transparency practices took time. In 1981, Karl Brunner was still speaking about the "mystique"
In the early 1990s, "mystique" was still the
of central banking.14 one-word advice offered by one prominent
central bank governor (Paul Volcker) to another (Mervyn King).15 For most of their history, opacity has been
deeply ingrained in central banks' psyche. And for much the greater part of its history, the Bank of England
was at the forefront of that opacity agenda.
For its first three centuries, the Bank appears to have kept its public utterances to a minimum. It was
effectively mute. The prevailing ethos was well-captured by the job description provided to the official who
the Bank's first press officer: "keep the Bank out of the press and the press out of the
became, in effect,
Bank".16
The Bank was good to its word.
During the period 1920 to 1945, the Bank's communications strategy was far from expansive. The Governor
gave precisely one speech a year - the annual Mansion House lecture (Chart 4). This tended not to be rich
in content. Nor was it not ideally suited to enhancing wider public understanding, being delivered to an
audience of around 300 City bankers and merchants, several glasses of wine into the evening.
Body language can sometimes substitute for the spoken word. So it was at the Bank of England. In the
1920s, the Governor's "eyebrows" famously became one of the Bank's means of communicating.
The
eyebrows were, in a way, a primitive form of emoji: sterling crisis - sad face. Nonetheless, for even the
Governor, the "eyebrows" were an imperfect communications medium.
most malleable-faced
Beginning in the 1960s, there was a sea-change in central bank communication practices. Speeches by the
Governor and his deputies increased, by the 1960s averaging around five per year. They were matched by
Quarterly
other communication innovations. December 1960 saw the first edition of the Bank of England
Bulletin. There was roughly a doubling in the number of speeches in each subsequent decade.
In 1992, a formal target for inflation was announced in the UK, together with a regular schedule of monthly
Inflation
monetary policy meetings. In 1993, the Bank began publishing a quarterly Report, setting out its
views on the economic outlook. In 1996, the Inflation Report gained a sister publication, the six-monthly
Financial Stability Review. With the arrival of the nine-person Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in 1997,
the number of published speeches increased further from around 13 per year in the nineties to around 34 in
the noughties. Accompanying these speeches were published minutes of MPC meetings.
14
See Brunner (1981) and Goodfriend (1986).
15
As described by King (2000).
16
Capie (2010).
"forward guidance" on its
In 2013, the Bank began issuing so-called policy actions.17 In 2014, following a
review by David Stockton, the Bank began publishing forecasts for a wider set of variables.18 And from
2015, following a review by Kevin Warsh, the Bank agreed to publish full transcripts of MPC policy meetings
(Table 1).19
These publications do not capture the entirety of the Bank's engagement strategy. In 2016 alone, the Bank
appeared before Parliament on 22 separate occasions. Senior Bank officials made around 60 visits to the
Bank's regional agencies across the
UK. Bank officials visited nearly 5,000 companies and charities. The
Bank ran a schools competition, involving over 250 schools. And it hosted a Future Forum, at which it
engaged openly with a broad cross-section of the public on a wide range of issues.
These step changes in transparency have been broadly mirrored across a range of other central banks.
Notable milestones among the world's major central banks have included: in 1994, the Fed's decision to
announce immediately its target interest rate after each meeting; the announcement of different forms of
forward guidance, starting in Japan in 1999; publishing minutes of policy meetings, most recently introduced
by the ECB in 2015; and forecasts for interest rates, which the Fed has done since 2012 (Table 1).
The major central banks' engagement strategies have been equally as impressive. For example, the
Federal Reserve has a long-standing and extensive commitment to promote community development at the
national, regional and local levels. That includes working with communities whose residents are low- and
moderate-income. The various initiatives of the Community Development team at the San Francisco Fed are
excellent examples of this work.20
The Federal Reserve has also sought to learn from listening to the views of those same communities. In
2015, the Federal Reserve Board formed a new Community Advisory Council, which contains a diverse
group of 15 citizen representatives. It meets with the Fed Board twice a year to provide information and
recommendations on policy matters, with a focus on issues relevant to low- and moderate-income residents.
Bringing this together, it is possible to construct weighted-average aggregate transparency indices. These
show a steady ratchet-up in openness across a range of central banks over time (Chart 5). And if we look at
mentions of the world's major central banks in the main newspapers, these have also been on a
steadily-rising trend over time (Charts 6A and 6B).
What a difference a century makes. A century ago, the Bank issued one speech a year. In 2016 alone, it
issued 80 speeches, 62 working papers, close to 200 consultation documents, just under 100 blogs and over
100 statistical releases - in total, over 600 publications. That is around 9,000 pages or around four and a
17
Monetary Policy Committee (2013).
18
Stockton (2012), McKeown and Paterson (2014).
19
Warsh (2014), Bank of England (2014).
20
See Williams (2016a) for a discussion of one of these initiatives.
half million words. It would not be over-egging this pudding to call this a genuine revolution in central bank
transparency. And this revolution has taken place, in central bank terms, at warp speed.
The Benefits of Central Bank Communication
In lockstep with this evolution-cum-revolution in central bank transparency practices has emerged an
academic literature seeking to understand, explain and assess the implications of this shift. This literature
7 plots the percentage of mentions of the words "central bank" followed by
has been growing fast. Chart
"communication" in
English-language publications over the past 70 years.21 It shows an exponential
increase.
This literature provides a useful starting point for assessing the progress made so far by central banks in
boosting their openness, the advantages this may have conferred and where future transparency efforts
might best be directed. In theory, transparent communications confer two high-level benefits.22
First, improved central bank communications can help stabilise the economy. They do so by improving
outside agents' information on the likely course of the economy (now and in the future) and/or on the likely
course of policy (now and in the future). This reduces the degree of uncertainty felt by households and firms,
better enabling them to make decisions about spending, saving, working and the like.
Improved information about the economy or economic policy may also have an effect on expectations.
For example, information on the target or instrument paths for monetary policy might help shape inflation
expectations. In this way, transparency initiatives can also help improve the effectiveness of economic
policy.23 These are the ex-ante benefits of communications arising from improved understanding.
Second, transparent communications improve the ability of outside agents to assess the performance of the
central bank and hold them to account. They fulfil a democratic demand for accountability.24 They also
increase incentives for the delegated party to make wise decisions in the first place, knowing they will be
held to account.25 These are the ex-post benefits of central bank communications arising from improved
trust.
These conceptual benefits, improved understanding and trust, are fairly well-understood, if not
uncontentious.26 Over the course of the past couple of decades, a body of empirical evidence has built up to
21
Drawing on the methodology from Hansen and McMahon (2016).
22
For example, Blinder et al (2008), Reis (2013).
23
For example, Crowe (2010), Eusepi and Preston (2010) and Hubert (2015).
24
Briault et al (1997), among others, make this point.
25
See the survey by Geraats (2002).
26
Morris and Shin (2002) argue that noisy central bank communication can worsen the understanding of monetary policy, if they cause
expectations to coordinate away from fundamentals. Kool et al (2011) show how even precise communication could worsen outcomes,
if it leads the private sector to reduce investment in information.
- -
assess some but only some of these benefits. Let me set out some of the key lessons from that
literature, before identifying places where the existing evidence base is sparse.
The richest seam of research has focussed on whether and how central bank communications have affected
financial markets, often using event-studies around the time of key announcements. This has concluded,
perhaps unsurprisingly, that central bank announcements cause significant movements in asset prices.27
For example, they cause adjustments along the yield curve, in equity and corporate bond prices, in the
exchange rate and in the volatility of these asset prices.
This suggests central bank announcements are a significant source of information to financial markets, either
about the course of the economy or the course of policy or both. That is despite often sharp differences in
communication strategies across central banks.28 It is difficult to say, definitively, whether these strategies
have improved the efficiency with which asset markets function, given that fundamentals are unobservable.
But that is not an unreasonable conjecture.
A second strand has assessed how central bank communications affect professional forecasters. The
evidence suggests they have a good understanding of how monetary policy behaves.29 Central bank
communications have been crucial to that understanding. For example, this improved after the Fed began
giving press conferences in 2011.30 And central bank communications have been found to contain
information that can help predict future policy decisions.31
A related literature has looked at the impact of monetary frameworks and communications strategies in
shaping inflation expectations and in influencing inflation dynamics. Generally speaking, this points towards
the announcement of formal inflation targets having helped anchor the inflation expectations of financial
market participants, companies and consumers around these targets.32
A third strand has looked at the role of the media in intermediating central bank messages. Studies have
examined the factors that influence how the media intermediate central bank messages.33 There is mixed
evidence on how well the media performs this task. There is evidence the media leads to a better
understanding of the ECB's monetary policy.34 But in the US and Germany, there is evidence the media may
sometimes impair communication and bias opinion.35
27
For example, Gürkaynak et al (2005), Hendry and Madeley (2010), Ranaldo and Rossi (2010) and Hayo et al (2010).
28
Ehrmann and Fratzscher (2007).
29
Carvalho and Nechio (2014).
30
Dräger et al (2016).
31
Sturm and de Haan (2009).
32
For example, Joyce et al (2010) and Gürkaynak et al (2010).
33
Berger et al (2011) find that press reports of ECB decisions are more critical when the decision is a surprise, or when made under a
backdrop of high inflation. The reception is more positive when press conferences are informative or if the ECB president has recently
been active in giving statements.
34
For example, van der Cruijsen et al (2015).
35
See Dräger et al (2016) for the US and Lamla and Lein (2014) for Germany.
As the number of central bank publications has expanded, a new strand of research has begun analysing the
words and phrases used by central banks, using semantic-modelling and other text-mining techniques.36 For
example, these methods can be used to extract from written central bank material the key themes and issues
that have been the focus of central bank deliberations and communications.
Academics Stephen Hansen and Michael McMahon have used semantic techniques to identify particular
monetary policy topics. These can be used to quantify how much emphasis an issue has had in committee
deliberations. For example, Charts 8A and 8B focus on the topic of the "labour market" in the MPC's
minutes. They suggest the fraction of time spent discussing this topic picked up in 2013, the year that the
MPC issued forward guidance linked to the unemployment rate.37
Charts 9A and 9B do the same for the FOMC's deliberations, focussing on groups of words from FOMC
related to "recession". With individual FOMC transcripts, we can also track how much time each
transcripts
individual FOMC member devoted to this topic, shown in the range. The median FOMC member started
talking more about recessions at the point the US downturn took hold, although there was a significant
variation in the time different FOMC members devoted to this topic.
Taking this literature together, it suggests the great strides forward in central bank transparency over recent
years have delivered some significant stabilisation benefits, most notably for financial markets, inflation
expectations, macro-economic forecasts and, to some degree, media reporting. So what the missing links
when assessing the potential benefits of central bank communications? Three stand out.
ex-ante
First, the vast majority of studies have focussed on the informational benefits of central bank
transparency. There is far less evidence assessing whether openness initiatives have affected central bank
-
legitimacy the ex-post accountability benefits. In other words, empirical evidence has focussed on the role
of central bank transparency in fostering understanding rather than trust.
Second, studies have focussed on the impact of central bank communications on the key information
- -
intermediaries Markets (M), Economists (E) and News (N) rather than the general public. Empirical
studies of central banks have been dominated by MEN. This is a notable gap. It is the general public who,
ultimately, make decisions about spending and saving in the economy. And it is the public who decide,
ultimately, whether central banks are serving society well or poorly.38
Third, when it comes to assessing the impact of central bank actions on the trust and understanding of the
public, little if any attention has been paid to some of the richer informational channels through which news
36
See Bholat et al (2015) for a summary of these methods.
37
the Bank's
Ongoing work by Hansen, McMahon and Tong uses these techniques to analyse Inflation Report and finds that its text
moves financial markets, even after controlling for the Report's quantitative aspects. This suggests that the narrative explaining what
drove the forecasts and how the committee interprets the data matters, not just the numerical forecasts.
38
(2008) suggest that
For example, Blinder et al "Virtually all the research to date has focused on central bank communication with the
It may be time to pay some attention to communication with the general public...In the end, it is the general public
financial markets.
that gives central banks their democratic legitimacy, and hence their independence."
might spread between people. For example, the recent work of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller has
emphasised the role of "popular narratives" in shaping the public's expectations and decisions.39
Story-telling is the ultimate communications device. History is no more than a sequence of stories. These
stories spread word by word, mail by mail, Tweet by Tweet. They obey the same laws of motion as
epidemics, with viral spread beyond a tipping point. And in a world of modern media, these popular narrative
This matters for individuals'
epidemics are probably spreading further and faster than ever previously.
feelings and decisions and, potentially, for macro-economic behaviour.
Pessimistic popular narratives have been used to explain the sharp contraction of spending at the time of the
Great Depression and the Great Recession.40 With popular narratives more virulent than in the past,
tracking their source and spread may be increasingly important for understanding the economy. This poses
risks to policymakers. But it also presents opportunities if they are able to shape and shepherd these
narratives through adroit communications.
Understanding and Trusting Central Banks
Even if the empirical literature is sparse, the great leaps forward in central bank openness over recent years
would be expected to have earned them a transparency dividend among the harder-to-reach general public.
That dividend might take the form of improved trust in central banks by the public and an improved
understanding of their functioning. There is disappointingly little evidence of either.
Trust in institutions generally has taken a body-blow over the past few years. The Edelman global survey
suggests that public trust in businesses, government, NGOs and the media has fallen sharply. In 2016, only
around half of the general public trusted these bodies. In the UK, fewer than 30% of the population trusted
these institutions in the latest survey, down from over 40% a few years ago (Chart 10).
The source of dwindling trust is itself revealing. It reflects a widening gap between trust in institutions among
the elites (which has held firm) and among the general public (where it has fallen). This trust gap between
elites and the general public averages 15 percentage points globally, having been around 9 percentage
points as recently as 2012. In the UK and US, this gap is around 20 percentage points.41
What is true of institutions appears to be true too of the economics profession. A recent poll by YouGov in
the UK asked the general public how much they trusted various professions.42 Economists were towards the
bottom of this list, well below scientists, historians, weather forecasters and even sports commentators
39
Akerlof and Shiller (2009), Shiller (2017).
40
Shiller (2017).
41
Elsewhere, I have called this widening trust gap the Great Divide (Haldane, 2016).
42
YouGov (2016).
- -
(Chart 11). There is always someone worse off than you in this case it was politicians but the overall
picture is discouraging.
If trust in institutions is low, and if trust in economists is low, the backdrop is not propitious for institutions
containing (lots of) economists. So it is with central banks. Chart 12 shows some measures of trust or
confidence in the four major central banks over the past decade. In the UK, the US and the euro area, trust
has fallen over that period, often coincident with the global financial crisis. The Bank of Japan has been an
exception, although its financial crisis came rather earlier.
If we turn from trust to understanding, the picture is similar. In 1997, Robert Shiller conducted a survey of
public attitudes towards inflation. He concluded then: "there will probably always be a communications gap
between economists and the public. But there appears to be rather more of a gap than most of us would
have expected".43
In the period since, there is little evidence this gap has closed.
A survey by the BBC in 2011 asked the public about the meaning of the words "inflation" and "GDP", the two
central concepts in modern-day macroeconomics. Only 16% of the general public could clearly define what
was meant by inflation, while only 10% could do so for GDP.44 For central banks, whose stock-in-trade is
inflation and GDP control, these fractions are disappointingly low.
In 2013, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales conducted a survey of economic experts and the general public
on a set of economic policy questions.45 Not only were there large differences between experts and the
public in their answers. Tellingly, these differences were largest in those areas where experts were most in
Expert economic opinion increased the general public's sense of scepticism. That gap between
agreement.
elites and the general public is, if anything, even larger when it comes to economic issues.
Turning to central banks, it is a good news/bad news story. In surveys, around 60% of the general public
believe the Bank of England has a good understanding of the economy. This is the good news. The bad
news is that only around a quarter believe it explains its actions and decisions in terms they can
understand.46 On monetary policy, around half of the general public do not know who sets interest rates.
Almost a half have either never heard of the MPC or think it is part of government.
Let me give a specific policy example to illustrate this (lack of) understanding. In the summer of 2013, the
MPC provided guidance about the future path of monetary policy. This guidance was aimed explicitly at
reducing uncertainty among households and companies, with simple and clear language about the future
path of policy. It was accompanied by a communications plan focussed on the general public, including TV
interviews and a published document.
43
Shiller (1997).
44
Quoted in Thompson (2016).
45
Sapienza and Zingales (2013).
46
See Haldane (2016).
The Bank conducted a survey after the guidance had been issued, with the aim of assessing its impact on
painted a mixed picture. The Bank's message got through to around 75% of
the general public. This
companies, but only around one-fifth of households. Moreover, even among those households who heard
the guidance, as many felt less confident as more confident about the economy (Table 2).
In the US and the euro area, surveys h