How—and how much—should central banks talk?

Aug 6th 2026|5 min read

THE ORACLE of Delphi had a gift for being right. Seated in Apollo’s temple, the Pythia delivered her prophecies in riddles. When Croesus, king of Lydia, asked whether he should attack Persia, she replied that he would “destroy a great empire”. So he did: his own. The philosopher Heraclitus described the Delphic method as one that “neither conceals nor reveals, but gives a sign”. Her commanding pronouncements demanded attention; their ambiguity made them almost impossible to prove wrong.

For much of the 20th century central bankers cultivated a similar mystique. Their authority rested on the impression that they were omniscient and omnipotent. Since in truth they were neither, obscurantism was useful. Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, was said to operate by the maxim “never explain, never excuse”. In 1981 Karl Brunner, a Swiss economist, described central banking as thriving on the impression that it was “an esoteric art”. Alan Greenspan, the late former chairman of the Federal Reserve, perfected this art with “Fedspeak”. He had learned, he said, to “mumble with great incoherence”.