Ben Bernanke calls on Bank of England to consider publishing interest rate projections

Not a ‘slam dunk’

Former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has urged the Bank of England to consider publishing the Monetary Policy Committee’s own interest rate projections.

During a Treasury Committee hearing on Wednesday (15 May), he told MPs he would be "disappointed" if the Bank did not seriously review this possibility "at some point in the next couple of years". Bernanke, who led an independent review of the BoE's forecasting for monetary policy-making and communication, said that although incorporating rates projections similar to the Fed's so-called ‘dot plot' would not be a "slam dunk", it is "something worth looking at".  Adopting the dot plot, which shows the rate projections of all the Federal Open Market Committee officials, was not a formal ...