Central banking then and now - speech by Charlie Bean

At the Sir Leslie Melville Lecture, delivered at Australian National University, Canberra, Charlie Bean – Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy and member of both the Monetary Policy Committee and Financial Policy Committee – seeks to learn the lessons of the financial crisis for central banks around the world.

Published on 12 July 2011

Lesson 1 is that, “...in a crisis, central banks need to show flexibility”, as Charlie Bean describes the expansion of the Bank of England’s balance sheet in pursuit of both its financial and price stability objectives. Furthermore, the crisis has also prompted permanent changes in monetary frameworks such as the expansion by the Bank of England in the range of collateral it will accept in some operations.

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