Thank you, Mr. Kramp.
In terms of the comparables, I will give you two. One, there is a small set of central banks--the Riksbank in Sweden and the Norges Bank in Norway are two examples--that provide a path every time they make a decision for their overnight interest rate, all the way out, if you will.
There are examples of central banks that do that. Their view is that to have the overall impact each time they make a decision, it is where that path as a whole goes in the market. It's, if you will, the ultimate in transparency.
Now the other relevant data point, to answer your question, is what happened earlier this decade when there was concern about potential deflationary pressures in the United States. The Federal Reserve gave verbal guidance that rates would be low for a considerable period. There was a range of verbal phrases that gave guidance to the market in terms of where rates would be, if you still had ambiguity or you had some ambiguity in terms of the exit strategy, some would suggest.
The judgment of the bank and the decision came from the governing council--the six of us, Mr. Jenkins, me, and the four deputy governors--that to provide this clarity was the best thing for markets, given that we were at the zero lower bound, given that we had gone to as low as we could go.
To answer the last bit of your question, on what the risks are, I would say the biggest issue here is that people start to confuse a conditional commitment with a guarantee. It's not a guarantee; it is conditional on the outlook for inflation. Our judgment is that keeping rates at this rate through June 2010 is consistent with achieving our inflation target. I would draw your attention to our outlook for inflation on page 24, where we have probability bands around that outlook for inflation.
So if you want to judge, if you're bullish on inflation or on the outlook, you can see what the relative probability is that we would get there sooner and that we would have to change that commitment.