in this direction during the crisis, be it through forward guidance on their policy or enhancing communication with the public. and this is in my view a thoroughly welcome development. the days of central banks acting as opaque and secretive institutions should be consigned to the past. more transparency benefits central banks by making them more accountable and effective. and in our case it also helps deal with the particular challenges of setting monetary policy in a multi - country monetary union. throughout the crisis citizens in some parts of the euro area have been calling on the ecb to do more, while elsewhere we have been called to do less. this is inevitable in a monetary union. but i trust that by publishing our account we can help the public to understand how all viewpoints are reflected and respected in our decisions, and how in the end we strive to take the decision that best serves the euro area as a whole. bis central bankers ’ speeches

clarify our reaction function going forward, in my remarks at the european parliament last week i discussed the conditions that will determine the duration and intensity of our expanded asset purchase programme, above and beyond our expressed intention to carry out our purchases until end - september 2016. i stressed that the governing council will take a holistic perspective when assessing the path of inflation. we will evaluate the likelihood for inflation not only to converge to levels that are closer to 2 %, but also to stabilise around those levels with sufficient confidence thereafter. when doing this assessment, the governing council will follow its monetary policy strategy and concentrate on inflation trends, looking through any surprise in measured inflation ( in either direction ) if judged to be transient and with no implications for the medium - term outlook for price stability. this remains in line with our tradition of conveying the governing council ’ s assessment in qualitative terms, also in the case of our forward guidance, rather than in quantitative terms, e. g. using numerical thresholds. opening up our monetary policy meetings perhaps the greatest innovation in our transparency and communication, however, has been the decision to publish an account of our monetary policy meetings – an issue that has been debated since the ecb was founded in 1999. this is not to say that we have been opaque about our deliberations in the past. the ecb was a pioneer in establishing, from day one, monthly press conferences immediately following the governing council meeting, where the president and vice - president face questions in real - time. the federal reserve only adopted this practice in april 2011 and at quarterly frequency. bis central bankers ’ speeches however, we have taken the view that with transparency “ more is not always better ”. especially in the early days of the ecb, when our credibility and the collegial nature of our decisions still had to be established, we put a premium on speaking to the public with one voice. our concern was that published minutes or accounts could have compromised this – and i do not think this was unfounded. at the time, even slight differences in messages between members of the governing council were criticised by commentators as a “ cacophony ”, while differences of opinion within the monetary policy committee ( mpc ) of the bank of england, with its external members, were often praised as reflecting the richness of its discussion! the point is that context matters. it is not enough just to communicate ; the conditions also have to be in place for that communication to be well understood