Get the Bank of England on TV?

ptburkis

Hi Guys,

I'm not 100% sure where to post this, but I thought I'd start here and see what you thought.

Personally, I would like to start a campaign to get the Bank of England on TV once a week during this cost of living crisis to get them to stand up and explain the decisions that they're making - in the same way that the government did during Covid with Sir Patrick Valance and co.

The reason for this isn't anger or annoyance about the situation (which I am, and we all are), but more about educating and explaining. I also feel that if they had to get in front of the entire population on TV and explain their decisions with supporting data, they might think up other ways in which they could affect inflation - other than just interest rates.

I find all of the current information that is published from the Bank of England is very obtuse and vague - fundamentally each interest rate rise comes down to "COVID complications and the war in Ukraine" - no other data points and I just feel like we're being fobbed off.

Obviously, the data is provided by the ONS - which when you read it in details - you can clearly see that the bulk of the increases are are purely caused by cost pressures on the businesses due to COVID and the war in the Ukraine. However, typically, elevated inflation is caused by there being too much money sloshing around in the economy and businesses "chance their arm" to just keep increasing prices. In that scenario, raising interest rates to reduce available disposable income makes sense.

However, in this scenario, which is clearly seen in the data - it's purely cost pressure. If you then further reduce the incomes of households due to increased debt/mortage cost, and increased energy bills - yes, they're going to stop buying things, but they're also going to stop eating! You're not removing "disposable" income, you're removing "necessity" income. Similar problems to businesses, if you increase their costs further, they then have no choice but to either increase their prices further or go bust....

Anyway - what I'd like to see is someone / team from the Bank of England getting up in front of the nation weekly explaining the numbers and being accountable. I feel like it's too easy for them to just be a silent committee with a vote and not really have to explain exactly how this will fix things.

Personally - I think there's other ways that this could be attacked such as direct intervention in certain industries (surgically) via the treasury rather than blunt sledge hammer to crack a wallnut.

So - I was wondering if this was a campaign that we could start?