What are central banks really saying?

Central bankers hint at where interest rates are going in their speeches. This project reads thirty years of them from every central bank, scores each sentence as hawkish or dovish, and tests whether the tone tells you what the bank will do next.

20,744 speeches · 79 central banks · 1996 to Oct 23, 2026

Explore a central bank See the findings
Sentences scored
671,603
about policy, prices, rates or the economy
Agrees with people
65.3%
on 496 human-labeled Fed sentences
Tone moves with rates
19 of 21
central banks tested
Predicts the next move
No
no better than shuffled tone (p = 0.94)

How hawkish central banks sound, month by month

The average tone of the tested central banks' speeches over the previous three months. Tone turned sharply dovish in 2008 and 2020 and swung hawkish as inflation rose in 2022.

What tone means

Every sentence about policy, prices, rates or the economy gets a score from −1 to +1: how strongly it leans towards higher or lower interest rates. A speech's tone is the average of its sentences; a bank's is the average of its recent speeches.

Dovish −1

Points to easier policy: weak growth, rising unemployment, inflation below target, the case for lower rates.

Balanced 0

Neither way, or both at once: facts without a direction, or risks weighed evenly.

Hawkish +1

Points to tighter policy: inflation too high, an overheating economy, the case for higher rates.

In practice most speeches sit between −0.2 and +0.2: central bankers mix descriptions of the economy with policy signals, so averages move by small amounts and a shift of 0.1 is large.

Who sounds most hawkish

Mean tone of each central bank's speeches in the six months to Oct 23, 2026, for banks with at least three. Banks marked publish live feeds; the rest are as current as the BIS archive.
Central bank← dovishhawkish →Tone

From raw speeches to a tested answer

Four steps, each checked before the next. See each step in detail.

  1. Collect

    20,744 speeches from the BIS archive and five central banks' live feeds, matched to each speaker's central bank, split into 671,603 sentences about policy.

  2. Label

    A language model labels 8,001 sampled sentences hawkish, dovish or neutral. Checked against people, it agrees 65% of the time on Federal Reserve sentences.

  3. Score

    A small model that runs on a laptop learns from those labels and scores every sentence, so the archive is scored once for free and new speeches in seconds.

  4. Test

    Tone is tested against every rate decision of 21 central banks, with a placebo test so that chance improvements are not mistaken for a signal.

Tone follows the policy cycle; it does not call the next move

Speech tone rises before hikes and falls before cuts at 19 of 21 central banks. But it echoes the moves already made and the latest inflation figure as much as it anticipates the next, so once those are known it adds nothing to predicting next month's decision.
Read the three questions
Next: Explore a central bankSearch the 72 monetary areas and see how each one's tone tracked its rates.