At this point in the policy path, our Central Bank Sentiment trackers are showing some meaningful signs of life – not of all it totally anticipated. Here we highlight some key observations made over the last month around what Central Bank language is actually telling us from a quantitative point of view.

We regularly track and update our measure of positivity/negativity of Bank language contained in statements, outlooks and speeches on a scale of -1 to +1 in our DataHub for premium subscribers. There you can access full histories and dig deeper into the underlying drivers.

Note – our sentiment tracker is a moving average rolling over 10 instances of Bank communication. For each speech, statement, policy statement etc, we calculate sentiment via domain-specific language and terms used by policymakers. Data above 0 indicates more positive sentiment, whilst data below 0 indicates negative sentiment.

Chart 1: The ECB is the most negative it has been on our measure