years. both were agreed, collegiate - like documents, while not committing every member to every proposition. much the same can be said of our quarterly forecasts and inflation reports, which play a central role in the mpc ’ s system. our forecasts are the projections of the policymakers not the supporting analytical staff. it is striking that the ‘ individualistic ’ mpc publishes a common forecast, whereas the somewhat more - collegial fomc has long published information ( the central tendency and range ) about the forecasts of its individual members ( without the names ). the fomc ’ s approach allows the range of central projections to be transparent. it is see tucker, p m w, ‘ reflections on operating inflation targeting ’, speech at the graduate school of business, university of chicago, july 2006, bank of england quarterly bulletin q2 2006, pp 212 - 224. kate barker, ‘ monetary policy in the uk – the framework and current issues ’ delivered at the national association of business economics policy conference, washington dc, march 2005, bank of england quarterly bulletin q2 2005, pp 276 - 282. rachel lomax ‘ the mpc comes of age ’, a speech delivered at de montford university, february 2007, bank of england quarterly bulletin q1 2007, pp 106 - 111. charlie bean ‘ inflation targeting : the uk experience ’, speech at the annual congress of the german economic association, october 2003, bank of england quarterly bulletin q4 2003, pp 479 - 494. quite different in kind from the fan charts we publish in the uk, showing the band of uncertainty around central projections for output growth and inflation. our ‘ fans ’ are not, as is sometimes suggested, a way of encompassing the central view of each of the nine individual members ; they reflect collective discussion and agreement. mutual engagement would not be needed if we were in the business of publishing nine individual fan charts. frequently, we do indicate in the inflation report that different members assign different weights to the various risks around the central projection. and to be clear, individual members are not constrained to be part of the collective forecast ; if our differences were sufficiently material, we could make that clear quantitatively in the inflation report. but, if at any point, all nine members did so, the centrifugal elements of our individualistic system could, it seems to me, lead to genuine cacophony. in the interests of effective policy, the committee as a whole therefore has

##marise their views. but we could not sensibly have nine individual statements without risking what alan blinder calls cacophony. also, such statements would have to be prepared in advance, so there would probably be less listening and engagement at the policy meeting itself. at the other end of the spectrum, finding ‘ the average ’ for a collective committee statement is tough in the short time available, except where a majority has decided to change bank rate, or where ‘ no change ’ is driven by some clear common factors that it would be unreasonable to withhold from the public sphere until publication of the minutes a fortnight later. ‘ individualism ’ is also reflected in our public speeches and appearances before parliament. those individual exercises range widely – from assessments of the conjuncture, through examinations of particular parts of the transmission mechanism, to reflections on monetarypolicy making more generally. 3 but whatever the subject or scope, we are each speaking for ourselves, not for the committee as a whole. taken together, all this plainly sets up centrifugal forces, or blinder ’ s ‘ cacophony problem ’. as put that matters, since it is of course the systematic component of monetary policy that is doing the work in stabilising nominal trends. households, firms, the financial markets need to figure out what the committee – or, somehow, its marginal member ( s ) – thinks is going on in the economy and how it will react in setting bank rate ( ‘ our ’ reaction function ). but there are centripetal influences too. i shall highlight two. first, the aim of each member is not to be in a minority but for their preferred level of bank rate to be that chosen by a majority of the committee. this means that, in addition to clarifying our own thoughts, we are up to a point in the business of persuasion. ours is not a system of postal voting. it is a system of listening to and learning from each other. second, with qualifications, some of the mpc ’ s communications are relatively more collective. in particular, our communications on a broadly shared ‘ model ’ of how the economy works, and our forecasts of the outlook for growth and inflation. in 1998, the ( then ) committee published a paper on the monetary transmission mechanism ; and, in a 2007 paper to the treasury select committee of parliament, we described our view of material changes in the workings of the economy during the committee ’ s first ten