This chapter highlights a number of potential explanations for the apparent disconnect between the votes and the views of dissenting members of the Monetary Policy Committee. The MPC appears to agree more than would be expected on the basis of views expressed elsewhere in speeches and papers. None of them are particularly satisfactory. The obvious way to establish which, if any, of these explanations are relevant is to ask former members of the Committee what they think. There remains a compelling case for producing an oral history of the Monetary Policy Committee if we want to understand how and why committees function in practice.

The chapter introduces and analyses the ECB as it was designed to become the central bank of the European Macroeconomic Constitution. It provides a view on how the ECB operates and how it aims to achieve price stability but also becomeaccountable. Three different but interlinked concepts are evaluated: monetary policy strategy, the monetary policy transmission mechanism, and the operational framework. Monetary policy strategy describes the ECB’s role in the economy and how it achieves its objectives. The monetary policy transmission mechanism is embedded in monetary policy strategy and seeks to explain how monetary policy measures are transmitted to the economy, and how monetary policy decisions affect the primary objective of price stability. The operational framework makes monetary policy decisions operational by proving the link from monetary policy decisions to money market interest rates and ultimately to the economy at large. These are discussed in turn after a brief description of the ECB’s organisation and decision-making bodies. A broad constitutional assessment of the ECB as it was designed finds that many elements raise some questions but generally the ECB confirmed the requirements of the European Macroeconomic Constitution, which is, in turn, a further confirmation of the constitutional reconstruction.

This chapter presents an overview of the development of inflation and monetary policy in Israel since the early 2000s. Unlike the discussion in the previous book, which centered on the disinflation process and the transformation of the economic and institutional environment as a result of the Stabilization Program in the mid-1980s (Ben-Bassat, 2001, Section II), the setting of the current chapter is of a large external shock: the 2008 global financial crisis against the background of a relatively stable domestic environment of economic policy — monetary and fiscal — and of inflation. The chapter describes inflation and its characteristics, monetary policy, and the mechanisms of transmission from policy to inflation. It focuses on recent years, those following the financial crisis, which have been typified, in Israel and abroad, by a low-inflation environment in view of very accommodative monetary policies. The last section concludes the chapter and offers some thoughts going forward.