Ben Bernanke Takes Aim at Central Bank Forecasts

Central banks the world over failed to predict the surge in inflation that started three years ago. Now they’re trying to learn from their mistakes.

For the Bank of England, that meant commissioning former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to write a review of the U.K. monetary authority’s forecasting system. The implications of the findings, published Friday, could reverberate far beyond Britain.

To be fair to the BOE, it didn’t do particularly worse than others in failing to see that supply-chain problems, energy-price spikes, and geopolitical tensions would generate the worst bout of inflation in a generation. Bernanke, who guided the U.S. through the 2008-09 financial crisis and won the Nobel Prize in 2022 for his work on the impact of bank runs in markets, notes the shocks were difficult to forecast.

“The forecasting and policy challenges faced by the Bank of England in recent years were hardly unique,” said Bernanke, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The Bank, like other central banks and policy institutions, will be working to draw the appropriate lessons from this experience.”

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