These made it possible to track – almost in real time – the number of applications to job retention schemes by region and industry and to analyse the use of job retention schemes by large firms. In similar vein, high-frequency data on weekly credit card payments can serve as a proxy for retail sales, and the consumption of inputs such as electricity, gas and fuel as a proxy for activity levels. Chart 8 High-frequency labour market indicators: hiring rate and job postings  Sources: LinkedIn, Indeed and ECB calculations. Notes: The methodology behind the high-frequency indicators on new hires and job postings is documented in the box entitled “High-frequency data developments in the euro area labour market”, Economic Bulletin, Issue 5, ECB, 2020. The latest observation is for February 2021. Survey-based information has proven especially useful during the pandemic. In addition to the wellestablished financial surveys carried out by the ECB (such as the bank lending survey and the survey on the access to finance of enterprises), the qualitative information collected in the regular corporate telephone survey and the rich information contained in the pilot consumer expectations survey have been important in policy-making. Addressing the measurement challenges Many of the indicators that we monitor at the ECB are provided by the national statistical institutes and the European Statistical System (ESS). The excellent cooperation between the ESS and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) during this challenging period has therefore been particularly valuable.

In the end, my main conclusion so far from the crisis is that flexible inflation targeting, applied in the right way and using all the information about financial factors that is relevant for the forecast of inflation and resource utilization at any horizon, remains the best-practice monetary policy before, during, and after the financial crisis. But a better theoretical, empirical and operational understanding of the role of financial factors in the transmission mechanism is urgently required and needs much work, work that is already underway in academia and in central banks. The outcome might very well be that financial factors are considered to have a larger role in affecting the transmission mechanism and as indicators of future inflation and resource utilization. If so, central banks would end up responding more to financial indicators, in the sense of adjusting the policy rate and policyrate path more to a given change in a financial indicator. However, this would not mean that financial factors and indicators have become independent targets besides inflation and resource utilization in the explicit or implicit centralbank loss function. Instead, it would be a matter of responding appropriately to financial indicators in order to over time best stabilize inflation around the inflation target and resource utilization around a normal level. 12 References Bank of England (2009), Inflation Report, February 2009, www.bankofengland.co.uk. Bean, Charles R. (2003), “Asset Prices, Financial Imbalances and Monetary Policy: Are Inflation Targets Enough?’ in Richards, A., and T. Robinson, eds., Asset Prices and Monetary Policy, Reserve Bank of Australia, Sydney, 48-76.