The Impact of the Public Authorities’ Messages – the European Central Bank Case

Abstract

The public authorities (the agency) messages could play a key role in the social subjects’ decisions. How and when the agency communicates the path of its future policies influences the present social and economic architecture. The aim of this paper is to advance an explanatory framework for the connections between the transparency and credibility of the public authorities and the volatility of the social output. In order to provide some empirical evidences, the paper will consider the case of the European Central Bank as a representative monetary authority. The main output of the paper resides in the thesis that, with a certain consistency, there are some connections between the agency’s mandates, the types of the messages transmitted by the agency and the volatility of the obtained results, and also in the idea that an agency entrusted with a “strong” mandate could transmit “mixed” type messages (i.e. “informative-persuasive” ones) which, in special conditions, could influence the decisions of certain categories of clients and/ or non-members. Of course, the following core question still remains: “How sustainable could be the effects induced by the impact of different agency messages received by the various beneficiaries?” And this, because in the end “The one who knows does not speak and the one who speaks does not know” (LAO ZI - DAO DE JING).

Keywords

• agency
• cultural paradigm
• financial markets
• central bank policies
• messages