yes, but only in a rare circumstance. bad decisions relating to monetary or financial institutions operations can be damaging with wide impact. to prevent this from happening, a mechanism should be installed such as a monetary policy committee or a financial institutions policy committee comprising of qualified external directors so that important policy measures are made through group decisions. the second issue is how independence should a central bank be? i believe that a central bank should be independent within the government because it is the minister of finance who has to be accountable to the parliament on issues relating to macro economic, fiscal, monetary and financial system matters. i agree absolutely with governor paul acquah that monetary and fiscal policies must be harmonized in order to achieve macro stability, meaning that a minister of finance and a governor of a central bank must work hand in hand to achieve a proper policy mix of fiscal and monetary policies so that sustainable growth can be achieved. ladies and gentlemen, i feel that i have taken enough of your time already. therefore, i would like to conclude that a central bank can be considered as having its independence when it can perform its duty of achieving and maintaining price stability without any political or governmental interference, and with honesty and integrity while working hand in hand with the ministry of finance to achieve a balanced fiscal and monetary policies mix that lead to macro stability and sustainable growth. inflation targeting approach is an effective mean to achieve central bank independence because it encompasses 4 very important ingredients : operational independence, responsibility, transparency and accountability. other means can be just as effective if they have these 4 required ingredients. i hope that what i have just shared with you on the topic of central bank independence and our experiences in adopting inflation targeting as a nominal anchor will be of some uses as food for thoughts. finally, i truly wish to congratulate the bank of ghana for the successful launching of monetary policy committee. thank you.

achieved anchoring of inflation expectations over the last eight years. 7 this in turn has contributed to low macroeconomic volatility in the euro area. 8 when inflation expectations are well anchored, temporary deviations of inflation from levels consistent with the central bank ’ s inflation objective are not expected to be long - lasting. as a consequence, macroeconomic shocks will have a smaller impact on inflation expectations and the evolution of inflation over time will be less persistent, with the result that inflation and economic activity will be more stable. it is certainly true that other central banks which put less emphasis on monetary analysis have also achieved low and stable inflation expectations and low macroeconomic volatility. however, it is important to bear in mind that the uncertainty faced by the ecb has been much higher than that faced by other more established central banks. our success in maintaining low and stable inflation expectations in a rather adverse macroeconomic environment is also due to the commitment to be continuously alert upon monetary trends built into our strategy by the money pillar. this brings me to the second question, on the criticism that our policy actions have not corresponded to the announced role of money in our strategy. i know that this objection is sometimes put forward by critical observers who argue that there is no direct correlation between our policy rate decisions and monetary developments. this kind of criticism does not discomfort me, because the relevance of the monetary pillar can anyway not be judged based on the simple bivariate correlation of policy rates with the growth rate of headline m3 ( or any other single monetary indicator ). first, such a simplistic approach cannot reflect the crucial role of cross - checking the information derived from the economic and the monetary analyses that is a key feature of our monetary policy strategy. second, it overlooks the broad - based and by no means mechanical character of the ecb ’ s approach to monetary analysis, which jurgen has also stressed yesterday. allow me to elaborate on the second point. monetary data are contaminated by noise at higher frequencies blurring the signal from their low - frequency movements which provide information about medium to longer - run inflation trends. the ecb ’ s monetary analysis aims to extract this low - frequency signal by assessing a large range of monetary indicators based on statistical tools and judgement in real time. since the signal extracted from the monetary analysis refers to the low frequency it will not change much from month to month. as a consequence, it will, by its very nature, normally not be closely correlated with individual policy moves, but will rather