Mervyn King: Twenty years of inflation targeting
Text of the Stamp Memorial Lecture by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, London
School of Economics, London, 9 October 2012.
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx
* * *
I am indebted to my colleagues in the Bank and on the Monetary Policy Committee for invaluable help and insightful
comments on earlier drafts of this lecture, especially to David Aikman, Charles Bean, Nils Blythe, Alex Brazier, Spencer
Dale, Iain de Weymarn, Richard Harrison, Andrew Hauser, David Miles and Tony Yates. In particular, I regard Tim Taylor
as a co-author of the lecture, although he is absolved of any errors in the current draft.
Introduction
I am delighted to be back at the School to deliver the Stamp Memorial Lecture. Lord Stamp was
eminent in the worlds of both academic and public life. Among other achievements, he was an
alumnus and a governor of the School, and a Director of the Bank of England. Following his
untimely death, in an air raid in 1941, he was succeeded at the Bank by John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes and Stamp often broadcast live discussions on the BBC which were published a week later
in The Listener. Their conversations during the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, are
eerily reminiscent of the enormous challenges we face today, as you can see from the following
exchange in 1930:
KEYNES: Is not the mere existence of general unemployment for any length of time an absurdity, a
confession of failure, and a hopeless and inexcusable breakdown of the economic machine?
STAMP: Your language is rather violent. You would not expect to put an earthquake tidy in a few
minutes, would you? I object to the view that it is a confession of failure if you cannot put a
complicated machine right all at once.
KEYNES: In my opinion the return to the gold standard in the way we did it set our currency
system an almost impossible task ... If prices outside this country had been going up since 1925
that would have done something to balance the effect on this country of the return to the gold
standard.
STAMP: Hush, Maynard; I cannot bear it. Remember, I am a Director of the Bank of England.
In some respects our experience today is no different: putting right our economic machine is
proving a slow and difficult task. But in the 1920s the Government made the task substantially
harder by reinstating the gold standard at a rate that left sterling overvalued. Today, monetary
policy is part of the solution, not part of the problem. That is thanks, in large part, to the monetary
framework we have had in place since 1992.
Twenty years ago today, on 9 October 1992, the newspapers reported that for the first time
monetary policy in Britain would be based on an explicit target for inflation. Three weeks earlier,
sterling had been forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). A new framework
for monetary policy was needed. After keen debates within the Treasury and the Bank of England,
the answer emerged - the inflation target. The essence of this new approach was the combination
of a numerical target for inflation in the medium term and the flexibility to respond to shocks to the
economy in the short run - and so the framework became known as flexible inflation targeting.
It is time to reflect on twenty years' experience of inflation targeting; fifteen years of stability and
five years of turbulence - the Great Stability and the Great Recession, shown in Table 1 and
Charts 1-3. Over that period, monetary policy around the world has changed radically. Inflation
targeting has spread to more than 30 countries. And the results in terms of low and stable inflation
have been impressive. There have been pronounced reductions in the mean, variance and
persistence of inflation in Britain and elsewhere. During the past twenty years, annual consumer
price inflation in this country has averaged 2.1%, remarkably close to the 2% target and well below
the averages of over 12% a year in the 1970s and nearly 6% a year in the 1980s.1
But did we pay too high a price for this achievement in lowering inflation? After fifteen years of
apparent success, the past five years of financial crisis and turmoil in the world economy have
raised serious questions about the adequacy of inflation targeting. We don't have to look far to see
that the costs of financial instability are huge. In Britain, total output is today some 15% below an
extrapolation of its pre-crisis trend, and that gap is likely to persist for some time yet.2 In the light of
such costs, should monetary policy go beyond targeting price stability and also target financial
stability? And should the present financial crisis lead us to question the intellectual basis of
monetary policy as practised in most of the industrialised world today? Those questions are the
subject of tonight's lecture.
The story of inflation targeting
But let us start at the beginning. Shortly after the adoption of inflation targeting, my predecessor
but one, Lord Kingsdown (Robin Leigh-Pemberton as he then was), gave an important speech at
the London School of Economics - indeed in this room - entitled "The Case for Price Stability".3 I
remember it vividly - for I had been involved in drafting it. It was an exciting time; we were
reconstructing British monetary policy after the trauma of forced exit from the ERM. In those days,
of course, the Chancellor set monetary policy and the Bank of England played only a behind the
scenes role. But the role of the Bank was about to change - first with the Inflation Report in
February 1993, which gave the Bank its own public voice, and then with independence for the
Bank and the creation of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in 1997.
The inflation target was born out of the experience that high and variable inflation was very costly
to reduce and that only a policy based on domestic considerations would be credible. The objective
of monetary policy in the medium term would unambiguously be price stability. As the then
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, put it "we wish to reduce inflation to the point where
expected changes in the average price level are small enough and gradual enough that they do not
materially affect business and household financial plans". The idea that there is a long-run trade-off
between price stability and employment had long since been abandoned. That intellectual
revolution, associated with the names of Friedman, Phelps and Lucas, had stood the test of time
and formed the foundations of inflation targeting.
The initial reception of the inflation target among economists and commentators alike was distinctly
Financial Times
mixed. As the put it in a leader published twenty years ago today, "the
Chancellor's speech was as economically thin as it was politically disappointing". The critics
argued that the new framework was inadequate to control inflation. They were to be proved wrong.
Over the previous twenty years inflation had been the single biggest problem facing the UK
economy, peaking at 27% a year in 1975. Over the subsequent twenty years, inflation, as I
mentioned earlier, would average only 2.1%.
From the outset, inflation targeting was conceived as a means by which central banks could
improve the credibility and predictability of monetary policy. The overriding concern was not to
eliminate fluctuations in consumer price inflation from year to year, but to reduce the degree of
uncertainty over the price level in the long run because it is from that unpredictability that the real
costs of inflation stem.
The improvement in credibility of policy is shown by the fact that whereas in 1992 expected
inflation, as measured by the difference between yields on conventional and index-linked gilts, was
close to 6%, today the same measure is around 21⁄2 %.
Predictability of the price level is greater because over a long period inflation has on average been
close to the target4. Even if inflation deviates from target - as will often be the case - it is expected
to return to target, and so inflation expectations are anchored.5 That is why since 2007 the UK has
been able to absorb the largest depreciation of sterling since the Second World War, as well as
very large rises in oil and commodity prices, with an increase in inflation to an average of only
3.2% over the past five years and without dislodging long-term inflation expectations. So the
framework has been tested and has proved its worth.
But the current crisis has demonstrated vividly that price stability is not sufficient for economic
stability more generally. Low and stable inflation did not prevent a banking crisis. Did the
single-minded pursuit of consumer price stability allow a disaster to unfold? Would it have been
better to accept sustained periods of below or above target inflation in order to prevent the build up
of imbalances in the financial system? Is there, in other words, sometimes a trade-off between
price stability and financial stability?6
The intellectual foundations of monetary policy
The experience of the past five years suggests that we reassess the intellectual framework
underpinning monetary policy.7 The emergence of inflation targeting, and the successful results in
the form of the Great Stability, coincided with the development of the so-called New Keynesian
consensus on macroeconomic theory. This framework offered a theoretical foundation for flexible
inflation targeting. Central to the New Keynesian view is the assumption that some prices are
"sticky" and adjust slowly. That assumption has two implications. First, high inflation produces
inefficient changes in relative prices. As a result, there is a cost to inflation. Second, when central
banks change nominal interest rates they also affect real interest rates, and so encourage
households and businesses to switch expenditure from today to tomorrow or, as in present
circumstances, the other way round. In this way, central banks can, in the model at least, offset
shocks to aggregate demand.
But there are shocks to supply as well as demand. External cost shocks sometimes drive inflation
away from the target, as we saw in recent years with rises in world energy and food prices.
Because other prices are "sticky", attempts to keep inflation at target all the time would result in
inefficient fluctuations in output. There is, therefore, a trade-off between stabilising inflation and
stabilising output. Following a cost shock, it is sensible to bring inflation back to target gradually.
4
The difference between inflation and price level targeting is often exaggerated in the literature, as discussed in King
(1999).
5
Since the start of the crisis, there has been a convergence between the practice of flexible inflation targeting and the
practice of dual-mandate central banks. The Federal Reserve quietly adopted a 2% inflation target in January, and
Japan did the same with the announcement in February of a numerical goal for inflation of 1% a year. This practical
convergence means that there is now little steam behind the question of the relative merits of the two approaches to
the target, or mandate, for central banks.
6
A number of commentators have questioned the wisdom of flexible inflation targeting. For example, Eichengreen et al
(2011) and Barker (2012). The first of those asserts that "the traditional separation, in which monetary policy targets
price stability and regulatory policies target financial stability, and the two sets of policies operate largely
independently of each other, is no longer tenable" (op. cit. p. 5).
7
The most complete analysis of the New Keynesian model as applied to monetary policy is Woodford (2003). It is no
accident that in official circles the most serious questioning of the foundations of inflation targeting emanates from the
Bank of Japan (BoJ) and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). The "lost decade" has prompted an interesting
series of speeches by the BoJ's governor, Masaaki Shirakawa. And the BIS, freed from day-to-day involvement with
the setting of interest rates, has long argued that monetary policy and financial policy cannot be considered
separately.
In this, by now conventional, framework, the proper objective of monetary policy is to minimise the
variability of inflation around the target rate and the variability of output (or employment) around a
sustainable path consistent with stable inflation.8 Such an objective means that the central bank is
effectively choosing a trade-off between the volatility of inflation and the volatility of output. This is
sometimes described as choosing a point on the Taylor frontier showing, as in Chart 4, the
combinations of lowest volatility of inflation for a given volatility of output.9 That optimal choice
leads to a policy reaction function describing how the central bank responds to shocks hitting the
economy.10
The success of the New Keynesian framework was that it showed how the long run objective of
price stability could be implemented by an appropriate central bank policy reaction function. It
stressed the importance of expectations and credibility, to which too little attention had been paid
during the inflationary episodes of the 1970s and 1980s.
But inevitably, as with all models, the basic New Keynesian model omits a number of key factors.
The treatment of expectations is simplified, and neglects the possibility that expectations
themselves may be a source of fluctuations, rather than simply reflecting changes elsewhere in the
economy. Sentiment can vary, misperceptions occur, and people can change the heuristics they
use to cope with a complex world.11 And it lacks an account of financial intermediation, so money,
credit and banking play no meaningful role. Those omissions obviously limit the ability of the model
to help us understand the trade-offs between monetary policy and financial stability.
Although there is a, by now extensive, literature on financial frictions, including attempts to
incorporate them in New Keynesian models, it turns out that such extensions make little difference
to the propagation of shocks, to optimal policy, or to the quantitative conclusion that
overwhelmingly the most important objective remains inflation stabilisation.12 There is no doubt that
financial frictions such as asymmetric information, credit constraints, and costly monitoring of
borrowers, to name but a few, are an important part of the story of how crises happen and why
they impact on output. But those models do not provide a convincing account of the gradual
build-up of debt, leverage and fragility that characterises the run-up to financial crises.13
8
This specification of the objective function can be derived as an approximation to the maximisation of the welfare,
defined over consumption and leisure, of a representative consumer with an infinite horizon (see Rotemberg and
Woodford, 1997).
9
The frontier is named after the US economist John Taylor.
10
To implement such a policy reaction function requires an empirical judgement about the factors that drive the volatility
of both inflation and output. In principle, these should include those factors in the banking and financial system,
including movements in asset prices, that generate fluctuations in demand and output and affect the way in which
shocks are transmitted through the economy. In practice, however, rather little attention was paid to the role of the
banking system in determining inflation and output.
11
Brazier et al. (2008).
12
The relevant literature tries to integrate standard or workhorse models of financial frictions (such as the
Bernanke-Gertler (1989) model of the financial accelerator and the Kiyotaki-Moore (1997) model of credit cycles) into
a New Keynesian "sticky" price model. Examples of this literature include Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999),
Curdia and Woodford (2009) and Gertler and Kiyotaki (2010). The only way the addition of a financial sector "matters"
in these models is if we contemplate exogenous shocks to the financial friction itself. That is not very instructive.
Several interesting papers presented at a Federal Reserve conference in Washington in March 2012 analysed a wide
variety of potential "financial frictions" that might create externalities that would justify a policy intervention. My
concern is that there seems no limit to the ingenuity of economists to identify such market failures, but no one of
these frictions seems large enough to play a part in a macroeconomic model of financial stability. So it is not
surprising that it has proved hard to find examples of frictions that generate quantitatively interesting trade-offs
between price and financial stability - the finding in these models is that overwhelmingly the most important objective
remains stabilisation of inflation.
13
Focussing on small deviations around the linearization of the steady-state of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium
model helped to divert attention away from the gradual build up of big risks.
Existing models, then, do not tell us why stability today may come at the expense of instability
tomorrow. Perhaps we should heed the advice of Ricardo Caballero, who has written that
"macroeconomic research has been in 'fine-tuning' mode within the local maximum of the dynamic
stochastic general equilibrium world, when we should be in 'broad-exploration' mode".14
So let me now move into broad exploration mode and give three examples in which a trade-off
between monetary and financial stability might arise, and which could in theory justify a policy of
aiming off the inflation target in order to reduce the risk of future financial instability, before I turn to
whether such a policy would have been appropriate before the crisis.
The first is where misperceptions about future incomes persist and are embodied in key prices,
such as the exchange rate and long-term interest rates. Households, businesses, and banks can
all make big mistakes when forming judgements about the future, and make spending decisions
today which they will come to regret when their true lifetime budget constraints are revealed. There
is no mechanism for ensuring that misperceptions about the sustainable level of spending are
corrected quickly. It may take many years before those beliefs are invalidated by experience. So
an equilibrium pattern of spending and saving can emerge that is stable temporarily but not
sustainable indefinitely. And misaligned prices may reinforce mistaken beliefs if people are using
market prices to extract signals about future incomes and consumption opportunities. Evidence of
the persistence of misperceptions can be seen in the imbalances in the world, and especially the
European, economies.
I do not mean to imply that when economic agents make these mistakes they are behaving
irrationally. Rather that in a world of intrinsic uncertainty it is far from obvious how to make
decisions. The assumption of rational expectations is very helpful for economists when trying to
understand the implications of their own models - it is a discipline to prevent the drawing of
arbitrary conclusions. In practice, however, households are on their own in a highly uncertain and
complex world where they are learning from experience. When it comes to decisions about how
much to spend and how much to save, expectations of future incomes are crucial. In the absence
of a complete set of markets for future consumption goods - and labour - there is no mechanism
to ensure that decisions today, and so the implied plans for tomorrow, will be consistent with the
possibilities available in the future. If revisions to expectations of future incomes are uncorrelated
across households, then aggregate spending will be relatively stable. The problem comes when
many households have similarly over-optimistic views about the future. Aggregate spending and
borrowing can then be unsustainably high and lead to an inevitable correction at an unpredictable
date when reality dawns. Financial markets both reflect and propagate that common degree of
optimism. Sentiment and animal spirits can change very quickly.
Examples include the extrapolation of past growth rates of incomes or asset prices into the future
when in fact they reflect an adjustment of the level of income or asset price to a new equilibrium. At
the time, the MPC argued that the rise in the ratio of house prices to incomes in the years leading
up to 2007 reflected a fall in long-term real interest rates - in other words, an adjustment to a new
equilibrium house price to income ratio. But if households extrapolated past increases in house
prices into the future, then they may have mistakenly inferred that future incomes too would be
higher, and so spending and borrowing more than could be sustained. Similar arguments could be
made about the reaction of businesses and households to the rise in the sterling effective
exchange rate in the late 1990s, and I shall return to this later.
Since long-term interest rates in financial markets are, if anything, even lower today the question of
sustainability has not yet been resolved. Misperceptions mean that unsustainable levels of
spending, and associated levels of debt, can build up over many years. When those
misperceptions are eventually corrected, they lead to sudden large changes in asset values, a
synchronised de-leveraging of balance sheets, a large downward correction to spending and
14
Caballero (2010).
output, and defaults.15 Keynesian policies to smooth the path of adjustment by supporting
aggregate demand can help in the short run, but their effectiveness is limited by the fact that a
significant adjustment to spending - from consumption to investment - is required.
If policymakers can, first, identify misperceptions, and, second, correct them by changes in
monetary policy - both highly uncertain empirically - then there is indeed a trade-off between
hitting the inflation target and reducing the chance of a financial crisis down the road. But are
central banks less prone to misperceptions than others?
My second example concerns what Masaaki Shirakawa, Governor of the Bank of Japan calls the
"cycle of confidence". He argues that success breeds confidence, and eventually over-confidence
and complacency, leading to collapse. Such ideas are closely associated with the work of Hyman
Minsky and others. Minsky set out a "financial instability hypothesis" in which a period of stability
encourages exuberance in credit markets and subsequent instability.16
Perhaps the experience of unprecedented stability in the UK and world economies before the crisis
dulled the senses and bred complacency about future risks. I talked about this when I christened
nice
the period leading up to 2003 the (non-inflationary consistently expansionary) decade.17 The
point of that speech was that the following decade was unlikely to be as nice. And, of course, it
wasn't. But the point didn't get home, and the financial system became more and more fragile as
the leverage of our banking system rose to unprecedented levels. The experience of continuing
stability may have sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
That idea has been explored recently in an interesting new book by Nassim Taleb.18 He argues
that the opposite of fragility is not resilience or robustness, but "antifragility", that is a state in which
people or institutions thrive on volatility, shocks to the system and risk. We go to the gym to stress
our muscles in order to strengthen them; occasional seismic activity may prevent a more damaging
earthquake. Frequent exposure to shocks and surprises may improve the way people learn about
and manage risks. In a complex world, we are "better at doing than we are at thinking", in Taleb's
words. Unless we train and practice at coping with bad outcomes we may fail to respond in the
right way to adverse shocks when they come. "Antifragility" does not imply that it might be
desirable to engineer small recessions in order to head off a deep depression. We know far too
little about the economy to attempt any such strategy, and in a world of intrinsic uncertainty we rely
on heuristics - simplified rules of thumb - to guide our behaviour. But it offers a warning of the
dangers of believing that the role of monetary policy is to offset all shocks. Rather than pretend that
we can forecast the future, a more intelligent response is to reinforce the resilience of those parts
of the financial system that we cannot permit to fail and encourage entry and exit in a free market
in other parts. It is clear that we need to understand more about how stability affects risk-taking,
leverage, and the "cycle of confidence".
My third example relates to the so-called "risk taking" channel of monetary policy.19 Short-term
policy rates, especially when they are, as now, exceptionally low, may encourage investors to take
on more risk than they would otherwise wish as they "search for yield".20
Financial institutions with
15
There is a substantial literature on debt deflation, including Fisher (1933), Minsky (1982b), Bernanke and Gertler
(1990), King (1993), Eggertsson and Krugman (2012).
16
Minsky (1982a). More recently Geanakoplos (2010) has set out a theory of what he calls the "leverage cycle". Again,
this cycle is driven by sentiment, and has a self-reinforcing dynamic. In good times leverage increases and that helps
to drive up asset prices as optimistic investors can access financing on easy terms. But at some point bad news puts
the process into reverse. Losses trigger margin calls which force asset sales and cause a collapse in asset prices.
The reason that such a cycle is costly is due to a series of externalities and market imperfections.
17
King (2003).
18
Taleb (2012).
19
A term coined by Borio and Zhu (2008).
20
Rajan (2005) argues that the "search for yield" was an important ingredient in the story of the crisis.
long-term commitments (pension funds and insurance companies, for example) need to match the
yield they promised on their liabilities, with the yield on their assets. When interest rates are high,
they can invest in safe assets to generate the necessary revenue. When interest rates are low,
however, they are forced to invest in riskier assets to continue to meet their target nominal rate of
return. That tends to push down risk premia and lower the price of borrowing. Other investors too
find it difficult to accept that in a world of low nominal and real interest rates equilibrium rates of
return will not meet their previous expectations.21 If these mechanisms are important, the financial
cycle may be heavily influenced by monetary policy, especially when interest rates are low. That
also creates the possibility of a trade-off between monetary and financial stability.
All three examples suggest that the conventional analysis of the trade-off between the volatility of
inflation and the volatility of output is likely to be far too optimistic. Does this add up to a case for
"leaning against the wind" of rising asset prices rather than waiting to "mop" up after the bust?
Certainly we have seen that monetary policy cannot fully offset the effects of financial crises for two
reasons. First, crises may impact output before the response of monetary policy is felt. Second,
crises typically reduce potential supply growth, for example by disrupting the supply of credit to
productive firms. A failure to take financial instability into account creates an unduly optimistic view
of where the Taylor frontier lies, especially when it is based on data drawn from a period of
stability. Relative to a Taylor frontier that reflects only aggregate demand and cost shocks, the
addition of financial instability shocks generates what I call the Minsky-Taylor frontier, shown in
Chart 5. This reflects the influence of misperceptions, financial cycles and the search for yield. On
the Minsky-Taylor curve, for a given degree of inflation variability, output is more volatile in the long
run than on the simple Taylor curve. Ignoring financial instability might mean choosing a policy
reaction function that is believed to imply a trade-off at point O in Chart 5. In fact, the true trade-off
is given by point P. Once that is understood then the optimal policy reaction function might well
change and correspond to a trade-off at point Q.22
The examples I have given suggest the possibility that there is a trade-off between meeting the
inflation target in the short run and reducing the risk of a financial crisis in the long run. To shed
light on whether that possibility warrants a change to the way we implement inflation targeting, I
want now to conduct a counter-factual thought experiment and ask whether monetary policy before
2007 might have moderated the crisis if it had not simply pursued a target for inflation.
A counter-factual monetary policy 1997-2007
I want to ask whether, with the benefit of hindsight, monetary policy should have been set
differently during the period of the so-called Great Stability. Should interest rates have been higher
during that period in order to mitigate some of the growth of credit, rise in asset prices, and
increase in the leverage of the banking system? Many commentators today seem to think that the
answer is clearly yes - though I seem to remember that fewer said so at the time - and most of the
21
Another mechanism, working through banks' leverage, is posited by Adrian and Shin (2011). They show that if banks
target a Value-at-Risk constraint, then monetary policy loosening can increase risk taking. The reduction in policy
rates boosts asset prices (by lowering discount rates), and also steepens the yield curve which tends to increase
banks' net interest margins. Other things equal, this reduces bank leverage by boosting the net worth of the bank and
increasing its ongoing profitability. To hit its target Value-at-Risk the bank expands its balance sheet, purchasing
assets and pushing up the price of assets thereby amplifying the effect of the initial monetary policy loosening.
22
There is a further consideration that is even more intriguing. The existence of misperceptions, the "cycle of
confidence" and the use of heuristics, and the search for yield, all create direct welfare costs over and above their
impact on inflation and output because they distort household behaviour. This means that financial instability matters
for welfare independently of its effect on output and inflation. So policy is directed at reducing not only the volatility of
output and inflation but also the distortions to household decisions. That introduces a third dimension to the welfare
analysis and the constraint on policy-makers is represented by a three-dimensional Minsky-Taylor surface.
pressure on the MPC, both from without and within, was for lower rather than higher levels of Bank
Rate.23
Before trying to answer the question, let me remind you of two key facts about the Great Stability.
First, the growth rate of GDP over the period prior to the onset of the crisis in 2007 was 2.9%, very
close to its previous long-run average of 2.8% (see Table 2). Second, the policy rate set by the
MPC was higher than that in any other G7 country for almost the whole of the ten years prior to
the crisis (see Chart 6).
But if the rate of growth was sustainable, its pattern was not. In the late 1990s, there had been a
substantial, and not entirely explicable, rise in sterling of around 25% against most other
currencies, leading to the emergence of imbalances in the UK economy. These took the form of a
shift in the composition of output away from manufacturing and towards services, and a shift in
demand away from exports towards domestic demand. National saving fell to unsustainably low
levels.
In the early years of the MPC there was an intense debate about these imbalances, and how they
should affect monetary policy.24 In a speech in April 2000, I argued that "it is important not to let
domestic demand grow too rapidly for too long. The longer the correction is left, the sharper the
required adjustment will be".25 The question was how much to stimulate domestic demand, at the
cost of exacerbating the imbalances, in order to compensate for weak external demand, and the
minutes of the MPC in 2001 and 2002 explicitly discussed the case for accepting inflation below
target over the two-year horizon.26 The Committee rejected the case, and during that period most
of the dissenting votes on the MPC were for lower rates (see Table 3). The dilemma, and the
MPC's resolution of it, was summed up by my predecessor Eddie George in 2002 when he said
"So in effect we have taken the view that unb