Speeches by Baldwin.

“Good morning, Mr Enria. You have been asked to take on this role by the Governor and your background is primarily with the European Central Bank. I wondered whether you could share with the Committee what you think the European Central Bank does better than the Bank of England and what the Bank of England does better t…”

“Will that be one of your priorities: to take some of the things that you think the European Central Bank is doing better than the Bank of England and argue for a change there?”

“You are very much a poacher turned gamekeeper, are you not? I wanted to drill into your conflict of interest, because you still retain some UBS exposure. I am not going to pry and ask you how much that is or anything like that. I understand that these things are locked up for a period. Can you share with the Committee …”

“Have you seen anything in the data that you have seen so far that would make you believe that 50,000 was not a correct forecast?”

“I understand that. In an economic model, if you increase the price of employing a person by £900, and they are not expecting it, do you have more or fewer people employed?”

“My questions are for Dr Pill. Of the 12 recommendations from the Bernanke review, could you just update the Committee on how many you have already brought into your decision making? How many are ongoing? Are any of them proving to be impossible to implement?”

“You have the opportunity now to tell us what is going on at the bottom of this iceberg.”

“Have any of the recommendations become part of your way of working? You referred to the scenarios earlier, and I thought they might be linked to the Bernanke review.”

“When can we expect the recommendations to have been adopted by the Bank?”

“Does the work plan have an end date?”

“That is probably enough on the Bernanke report today. We can come back to this in future meetings.”

“You must have a view at the Bank of England. You have all these smart economists and all these forecasts. You must have a forecast for what you think is going to happen to employment.”

“How many is that in terms of actual jobs?”

“The characterisation that I would give to the evidence that we have heard today is that we have a UK economy that has managed to survive a range of shocks over the last few years, but it is an economy that is really just surviving and not thriving. Productivity—particularly public sector productivity—has not been demon…”

“It has just been published on our website. It is about national insurance contributions and trying to disaggregate them, but acknowledging that, of course, businesses will react in the four ways that you described earlier. I thought that it was a very interesting letter, because, clearly, we can observe that businesses…”

“Have I understood that correctly? Is it a yes to that first question?”

“So it is limited as to how much can happen through that channel. That is what your letter says.”

“You then said that there has been an impact, in that businesses have been able to react to the tax increase by raising their prices. You quantify that in your letter as being between 0.1 and 0.2. Have I understood that correctly?”

“There has been a non-zero impact from the Budget on inflation.”

“They could react by reducing nominal wages. You have said that some of the transmission will happen in that way, and you are picking up some of that in your data. Am I correct in understanding that as well?”