In Brief short takes

Our econospeak isn’t easy reading, says Bank of Israel

You probably need a US college education to decipher the Bank of Israel’s interest rate announcements.

That’s the bank’s conclusion after studying more than a decade of its English-language rate announcements to determine how accessible they are to readers.

Central banks have been trying for years to make their monetary policies more transparent in order to improve financial stability by reducing “surprises” and market overreaction to decisions.

After studying its announcements between 2007 and 2018, the Bank of Israel concluded that it would take an average of 14 years of schooling in the US to understand them.

However, a complexity level that is too low “will make it very difficult to properly deliver technical and professional messages”, the researchers said.

Though the bank’s announcements may not be easy reading, the US Federal Reserve’s and European Central Bank’s are even more complicated, they noted. The Fed’s require an average of about 17 years of schooling, and the

European Central Bank’s 19.