to businesses to the media. they too appear to have suffered a loss of generalised trust over recent years, joining banking at the bottom of the league table. their crises have been different – from expenses to remuneration to mis - reporting – but the result the same. these trust - busting events have generated, as in finance, a growing perception gap between the elites and the general public. in 2016, the trust gap between the “ informed public ” and the “ mass population ” hit a new high of 12 percentage points at a global level. the uk results were even more striking. not only was the trust gap, at 17 percentage points, higher than in any other country, bar the us. but this gap has widened progressively since 2012, when it stood at only 7 percentage points. 28 sapienza and zingales ( 2011 ). european central bank statistical warehouse, available at : https : / / sdw. ecb. europa. eu / 2016 edelman trust barometer. for more information, see http : / / www. edelman. com / insights / intellectualproperty / 2016 - edelman - trust - barometer / global - results /. bis central bankers ’ speeches the bank of england has not been immune to this generalised loss of trust. while in general it fares pretty well relative to others, the bank ’ s net trust rating currently stands at 28 %. 29 the bank has a positive trust rating of more than 80 % among some members of the public, but among others it has a trust deficit of more than 50 %. as for banks, governments and the media, this too is quite a great divide. it was writer norman douglas who said that “ distrust of authority should be the first civic duty ”. 30 and as someone sometimes described as an iconoclast, i have sympathy with that sentiment. but, again rather like cholesterol, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. taken too far, distrust can be corrosive rather than regenerative. sometimes bridging that great divide can be a bridge too far. progress so far that begs the question of what can be done to close the gap, to restore trust in the financial sector, to alter the social identity of banking. there has been no shortage of ink spilled in crafting a response to the crisis. that includes regulatory response where there has been root - and - branch reform of both banks ’ prudential standards –

certain scenarios. we know we will also need to invest in developing a set of more specialised models to allow us to explore the economics of particular mechanisms in greater detail, as well as the toolkit that enables us to do a variety of monetary policy simulations in different scenarios for the economy. one important question will be how best to synthesise the information from a range of different modelling approaches for monetary policymakers. and whether we can and should do that in a more systematic way. [ 9 ] this is complex. some other central banks are, like us, undertaking major investment in their modelling toolkit and we will be able to learn from them. continuous learning we know that the answers to all these issues won ’ t be found solely in the bank. and that external engagement is part of an environment where monetary policy making is supported by a culture of continuous learning. we will consult with experts, academics, watchers, market participants [ 11 ], and our international counterparts. we are going to consider the best way to do that effectively. in the meantime, i want to highlight two initial changes. there is a lot of expertise outside the bank on macroeconomic modelling. we want to draw on that. to start the conversation, we are introducing a new technical paper series, and intend to begin a series of seminars on those papers in 2025. this will be our primary vehicle for documenting new models developed in response to the bernanke review. and we will also host a conference in summer 2025 to explore some of the interconnected issues around scenarios, modelling and communication for effective monetary policy making. another aspect we will build into the core of our approach is forecast evaluation. this will help us continue to adapt and update our understanding of the economy, and to improve our modelling, analysis and use of data. it will help us assess whether the scenarios we have considered were capturing some of the key risks missed by the baseline forecast, helping to inform future analysis. the bank already does forecast evaluation, for example the discussion of forecast performance that appears annually in the mpr. and bank staff continue to produce relevant research in this area. [ 12 ] building on this we can benefit from more formal and systematic quantification of the sources of past forecast errors. so we will introduce a new regular forecast evaluation report, building on the work that we have been publishing in the mpr. the lessons from this work will then be used to update our analysis and modelling. communications a core part of dr bernan