Official announcements

What the central banks and the market regulators actually published, newest first — with a link to the page here that explains the mechanism behind each one.

This is not a news feed. It carries primary announcements only: the press releases of eight central banks and regulators, each one a headline, a date and a link to the source. There is no commentary, no summary of anybody else's text, and no publisher's copy — for a legal reason and a better one, both set out at the bottom of this page.

How to use it before an interview

• Two or three items is enough. Being asked "what have you been following" and naming one decision you can explain beats naming six you cannot.
• Follow the mechanism link, not the headline. Knowing that a policy rate moved is not knowledge; knowing how a rate move reaches a mortgage, a bond price and a buyout bid is.
• Read the primary document. Every item links to the announcement itself, which is a page of plain statements rather than an interpretation of them.
• The date matters. An announcement from three weeks ago is not "the news" — this page says how old each item is and when it last managed to reach each source.

Why these sources and no others

Every source here is one whose material may lawfully be reproduced, and the reason is printed beside each one in the list above rather than asserted here:

• US federal agencies — the Federal Reserve and the SEC. Works of the US federal government are not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. § 105).
• German official announcements — the Bundesbank. Amtliche Erlasse und Bekanntmachungen carry no copyright protection (§ 5 UrhG).
• EU institutions and agencies — the ECB, ESMA and the EBA, each of which permits reuse for non-commercial and educational purposes with the source acknowledged.
• The BIS and the Bank of England, on their own published reuse terms — the second under Crown copyright and the Open Government Licence.

Commercial news publishers are deliberately absent. Reproducing a publisher's headline and standfirst is exactly what the press publishers' right exists to cover (§ 87f UrhG, Article 15 of the EU copyright directive), and "it is only a headline" is not a defence anybody should build on. There is also a better reason to leave them out: for somebody learning how this works, the announcement is the useful document and the commentary about it is not.

What the grouping is, and what it is not

The subject tag on each item is ours. It comes from a small, fixed list of keywords applied to the headline, and its only job is to route you to the page here that explains the mechanism. It is not the source's own classification and it is not presented as one. Where a headline matches nothing on that list the item is still shown, tagged simply as an announcement — dropping something because our keyword list is incomplete would be the worse mistake.

What happens when a source cannot be reached

Sooner or later one will not answer — a network, a redesign, a changed address. When that happens the page keeps showing what it last had from that source and says so, and if everything has been unreachable for more than two days it says that at the top rather than presenting old announcements as today's. The list above names the state of every source on the last attempt.

Nothing about you is sent anywhere in the process. The fetching happens on this site's own server, on a schedule of its own, not once per visitor — your browser only ever talks to this host, exactly as it does on every other page here.