This week's BOE Open Forum was attended by ECB boss Draghi, amongst other luminaries, and our guest economist John Hearn

John tells me that it was " ...not a great day overall. Good PR for the Bank, but the panels were not made up of experts so they could not answer the probing questions".

John himself had a number of questions lined up but failed to get any answers as he told the BBC here where their Economics Editor Robert Peston had similar reservations

"Having this sort of public consultation is a step in the right direction. If it's just a PR exercise it's worthless, but if the Bank can demonstrate that it's listening to what people are saying then that would be a good thing."

I'm sure John will keep us updated with any developments/feedback from the Forum in due course.

In the meantime you can follow John on Twitter here and check all his blogs here.