Minutes of monetary policy meetings are now attributed
For the first time, the Czech National Bank is to publish attributed minutes of its monetary policy meetings, i.e. minutes in which individual arguments are attributed to individual board members. The first minutes in the new form are those of the monetary policy meeting held on 6 February 2020. Such minutes were previously published in anonymised form.
The change is aimed at further enhancing the information value of the minutes and giving the public a better understanding of the individual board members' thinking and the reasons for their voting. The new form of the minutes should make the decision-making of the individual board members and of the Bank Board as a whole more predictable.
As from February this year, all the minutes of the Bank Board's standard meetings on interest rates will be in attributed form. In the event of the deployment of an unconventional monetary policy tool (such as the exchange rate commitment in 2013-2017), the minutes will remain anonymised.
The minutes of Bank Board's meetings, which are usually issued with an eight-day delay, contain information on the Bank Board's decision published on the day of the meeting on key interest rates. The importance of the minutes for monetary policy communication is described in detail in the article How does the Bank Board make decisions?
The CNB's motivation for changing the form of the minutes is explained by board member Tomáš Holub in a video interview.