, and at the conclusion of your deliberations travel safely back home. thank you. references fratzcher, m ( 2013 ) : the drawbacks of forward guidance. http : / / www. project - syndicate. org / commentary / marcel - fratzscherthe - problem - with - central - banks – communication - strategies. bis central bankers ’ speeches goodhart, c. 2013. debating the merits of forward guidance. in forward guidance. perspectives from central bankers, scholars and market participants, ed w. den haan, voxeu. org ebook, centre for economic policy research. bis central bankers ’ speeches

organises monetary policy forums at nine centres around the country, where members of the mpc and senior staff of the bank engage with various stakeholders and interested members of the public. a press conference is held after each monetary policy committee meeting, and is broadcast live on a number of tv stations, as well as a webcast. after the statement is read, the full mpc responds to questions from the press as well as other interested parties, who are welcome to send in questions electronically. the governors and senior officials of the bank are regularly invited to deliver speeches or participate in panel discussions. over the past two years, the number of speaking engagements accepted by myself and the deputy governors has exceeded 50! part of the challenge we face is striking the right balance between communicating effectively and over - exposure. however, despite these communication initiatives, we have a long way to go in terms of reaching the broader public. in 2011 we commissioned a survey of the attitude of the public towards the bank. the results of the survey were gratifying in that they indicated that the bank had a high degree of credibility in the eyes of the markets. however, 45 per cent of south africans were unaware of our very existence! perhaps the biggest communications challenge confronting central banks currently is the issue of forward guidance, or how to communicate monetary policy decisions. twenty years ago, the fomc did not announce its monetary policy decisions, or give any justification for it, and it was left to the markets to infer from the fed ’ s actions whether or not there had been a change of monetary policy. gone are the days when central banks believed it was appropriate to surprise the markets. today ’ s conventional wisdom is that monetary policy predictability will reduce trade - offs, and reduce volatility in both inflation and real economic activity. in other words, communication has become a policy instrument in itself. the more recent trend has been towards explicit forward guidance. this approach was started by the reserve bank of new zealand, and later adopted by norway and sweden, where the expected path of policy interest rates were published. during the financial crisis, forward guidance became more widespread, particularly in those countries where the zero bound had been reached, and where conventional policy options became limited. different types of forward guidance strategies were tried, ranging from providing a bias ; a vague or explicit time path for future policy changes ; to indicating state - contingent indicators for future monetary policy actions. for example, both the us fed and the bank of england specified unemployment threshold