Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks.

Douglas Holmes traces how inflation targeting, a traditional analytical focus of central banker's regulatory interventions, was enlisted in what he terms "communicative experiments" (p. 1) on the part of central banks, based on more than a decade-long ethnographic engagement with central bankers at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Sveriges Riksbank in Sweden, the Bank of England in the United Kingdom, the Federal Reserve System in the United States, and at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Addressing information asymmetries from the central banks' point of view, Holmes provides an intriguing empirical exploration of central banker's research practices. For example, after attending a pre-Monetary Policy Committee meeting at the Bank of England, Holmes realized that the Bank of England might, through its qualitative analytical procedures "tap into the creative acumen" of its network (p. 187). [Extracted from the article]