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The Bank of England’s Sir Dave Ramsden, aka Mr QT, has given a speech about… labour markets. Oh well. At least Megan Greene spoke about balance sheets earlier.
Rather than engaging with this in any kind of intelligent way, FT Alphaville was drawn to the first footnote in Sir Dave’s speech:
The number of times we’ve used ‘uncertain’ or ‘uncertainty’ in the Bank’s Monetary Policy Reports (MPR) has increased from 20 times in the August 2024 MPR, to 43 in the November 2024 MPR, 59 in the February 2025 MPR and 112 times in the May 2025 MPR
It’s a wonderfully crude measure, and, funnily enough, one mainFT’s Ian Smith has for ages been telling us to create across the world’s central banks — mainly with regards to some super-uncertain Aussies.
So *wearily opens spreadsheet* let’s.
Initially we intended to do this for all central banks but then our Mary Oliver instincts kicked in so we stuck with the BoE.
So we went through all the Monetary Policy Reports (and their Inflation Report predecessors) going back to November 2015, and created some data by searching the PDFs for “uncertain” and seeing how many hits we got per page. This generated slightly different results to Sir Dave’s, for reasons that — in order to protect our sanity — we chose not to explore.
Obviously our findings will be informationally derelict for various reasons:
— “uncertain” may mean “less uncertain” depending on the rest of the sentence it is in (eg November 2022 BoE MPR: “Uncertainty around the outlook for UK retail energy prices has fallen to some extent following further government interventions”)
— “uncertain” has synonyms
— we measured page count, but word count probably matters more
We can counterbalance this, however, by positing that when doing something is fundamentally stupid, it matters less how you do it.
Bon appétit — the raw numbers:
And in terms of “uncertain”/page:
Takeaways:
— the Bank of England normally mentions the word uncertain about once per page in its MPRs
— despite the implications of Sir Dave’s speech, they’re actually not very uncertain by their own standards for the past decade-ish
— the post-Covid era has been remarkable certain
What’s clearly most surprising is that the mega blowout “uncertain” report was that of November 2019, ie before the pandemic: 49 pages, 214 mentions of “uncertain”. The reason, as many readers can probably guess, was Brexit.
Can we learn anything from this? As usual: no.