More Broadbent highlights

Some more highlights from Broadbent - in terms of the lessons over the past few years (he is reflecting on his time on the MPC - this may well be his last major speech).

• "At the very least, however, the events of the past few years clearly suggest one should care about events abroad as much as those at home. One should also guard against the tendency to attribute every short-term move in UK economic data – even those over a period of a couple of years – to some domestic event."
• "As regards policy, we’d be unlikely to see a return to the halcyon days of the NICE decade, during which interest rates seemed to respond exclusively to economic growth. We should instead expect a continuation of the more recent pattern, in which policy has had to respond to a variety of more lagging indicators, including slack in the labour market and those relating to domestic inflation."
• "Hand-in-hand with greater volatility and uncertainty go larger forecast misses. These are uncomfortable but if the world is genuinely a noisier place, they’re also inevitable."
• "It seems to me all the more important, were this period of unstable and unpredictable costs and supply to persist, to retain the current institutional set-up, in which an operationally independent monetary authority seeks to meet a fixed inflation objective."