One of the interesting canards, perhaps as a result of the inflationary episodes of the 1970s and 1980s, was that price stability rapidly developed into a sufficient statistic to judge whether a macroeconomic equilibrium had been achieved. In both the public arena and the policy sphere, the continuing attainment of low and stable rates of inflation seemed to suggest that monetary policy had not only functioned well but perhaps had discovered the key ‘to end boom and bust’. Indeed, the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, summed up the view well, which was very much the overall consensus at the time, in a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce in 2000: