Account of the monetary policy meeting of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank held in Ljubljana on Wednesday and Thursday, 16-17 Oct

Thank you for your generous introduction, Marcela, and thank you for the opportunity to be here and speak to you today.1 I believe I am the first central banker from the U.S. to ...

In 2004, 20 years ago, a Federal Reserve Board Governor at the time, Ben Bernanke, gave a speech titled “The Great Moderation”. He outlined how, over the preceding 20 years, macroeconomic volatility had declined substantially and attributed this to three candidate explanations: first, structural change (such as improved economic institutions, technology, etc.), second, better macroeconomic policies (including but not limited to monetary policy), and third, simply good economic luck. In his speech, Bernanke concluded that the stability enjoyed from the mid-1980s was not primarily good luck, and that improvements in the conduct of monetary policy played a significant part. Today I am revisiting this question, with another 20 years of data. These 20 years have been defined mostly by continued macroeconomic stability, albeit punctuated by a number of major economic and societal crises with long-lasting ramifications. I will look both through a global lens and from the perspective of the UK, a small open economy that has experienced not only the global, but also domestic shocks. post: *BOE'S MANN: ACTIVIST STRATEGY ON MONETARY POLICY APPROPRIATE post: BANK OF ENGLAND'S MANN: I EXPECT ELEVATED VOLATILITY IN MACROECONOMIC VARIABLES OVER COMING YEARS