Readily available information about the current term structure of interest rates, its level and recent trends in important countries has become a standard tool of monetary policy analysis. Interest rate curves can be used for inflation and output forecasts, they may give useful indications about...

We start from the assertion that a useful monetary policy design should be founded on more realistic assumptions about what policymakers can know at the time when policy decisions have to be made. Since the Taylor rule - if used as an operational device - implies a forward looking behaviour, we...