Chairman of the Central Bank of the United States (Fed), Ben Bernanke, has dealt a further blow to the reputation of secrecy and opacity of the institution in deciding to hold regular press briefings.
Mr. Bernanke will hold press briefings four times a year to present the latest economic forecasts Monetary Policy Committee of the Fed and to provide additional circumstantial evidence on the Committee's decisions, "the Fed said in a statement.
The first briefing is scheduled for April 27, after the next monetary policy meeting of the Federal Reserve.Two more are planned for 2011: June 22 and November 2.
It is a revolution in communication and transparency for the Fed, which until 1994 did not communicate the decisions taken during meetings of its Monetary Policy Committee (FOMC).
It was then scrutinize the evolution of the interbank lending market on a daily basis, on which the Fed has daily, to get an idea of what she had decided.
Since then, the FOMC announces its decision in a statement issued at the end of its meetings and whose every word is weighed and analyzed by experts.
The Fed said that "the launch of regular press briefings designed to further improve the clarity and timeliness of [his] communication."
The FOMC holds a regular meeting every six weeks, eight times a year.
At the Committee meeting in December, several members had insisted on "communication challenges" facing the Federal Reserve to make it understand as precisely as possible its intentions.
Quiet by nature, Mr. Bernanke seemed rather reluctant to exercise press conferences.
He had participated in early February at a Washington press conference - where the questions were filtered by a moderator - who had the air of a trial run.
Mr.Bernanke said last year that his institution had not yet taken the decision "difficult" to communicate more often, just like what the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of Japan, whose respective presidents, Jean -Claude Trichet and Masaaki Shirakawa, give regular press conference.
"We do not want to create inappropriately uncertainty or volatility in financial markets by saying things that could be misinterpreted," he had said the same.
At the head of the Fed since 2006, Mr.Bernanke has profoundly changed the habits in the central bank, rejecting the "cult" which was under his predecessor Alan Greenspan, and leading the Fed to communicate a lot about his action.
Where Mr. Greenspan had made a specialty of small cryptic sentences, Mr. Bernanke, a former economics professor, is trying to explain in the simplest possible action.
The announcement of regular press briefings of the President of the Fed takes place while the U.S. central bank will soon have to clarify how it intends to fly the "crisis", that is to say how she intends to use to return smoothly to the hundreds of billions of dollars it has pumped into the U.S. economy to enable it through the crisis.
