Thank you.
Yes, when I arrived at the bank in 1981, for the second time, for my full-time job, we didn't have inflation targets then. We had money targets and they were posing some difficulties at the time, and since my thesis had been on exactly that, I was able to.... I was hoping to save the money targets, but in fact I just proved that they were unreliable, en passant, and so as a result Governor Bouey dropped that target.
What happened next was a big phase of heavy research for the new holy grail of monetary policy—and just coincidentally, Mr. Macklem was my colleague through that time. He came and joined the team, I think, in 1984, and we worked together on this, looking at alternatives. Through that decade, we looked at a lot of things, as I said, but in the end we ended up with inflation targets as the easiest thing to explain, the most direct thing to go after. It was during that phase that we decided that a two-percentage point margin would give us the zone of manoeuvre that we needed, and so on.
Those were formative years for me. I left the bank in 1995, just after the actual.... We've had the targets in place since 1991. By 1995 we were down to 2% as the target, which is where we are today. So I was there during those formative years.
Thank you.