Hawkometer — Central Bank Speech & Communication Sentiment Tracker
Score every Powell, Lagarde, Bailey and Ueda appearance on a hawkish/dovish scale, in near real time
Updated June 3, 2026Why a Hawkometer?
Markets do not just react to rate decisions — they react to the language around them. A single phrase from the Fed Chair, an interview with the ECB’s chief economist, or a testimony from the Governor of the Bank of England can move yields by basis points before the next meeting is even on the calendar.
The Hawkometer is a structured, machine-readable index of that language. Every public appearance by a senior official at one of nine major central banks is scored on a single scale:
- +10 — most hawkish (clear signal that policy will tighten or stay restrictive)
- 0 — neutral
- -10 — most dovish (clear signal that the easing cycle is approaching or under way)
Scores are aggregated upward into speaker, committee and cross-bank views, and combined with a 30-day vs. prior-60-day shift indicator that flags when a committee’s tone is turning.
The global dashboard
The bar chart below ranks each committee by its current 90-day, voter-weighted Hawkometer score.
A score above zero means that, over the last 90 days, the weighted average of all speeches by that committee has tilted hawkish. A score below zero means it has tilted dovish.
Per-bank Hawkometers
Each central bank has a dedicated Hawkometer page covering committee composition, voting bloc lean, recent speech sentiment and the upcoming calendar of appearances.
Coverage
| Bank | Committee | Speakers tracked |
|---|---|---|
| Federal Reserve | FOMC | Chair Powell, Vice Chairs, Governors and the regional Fed Presidents on the rotating schedule |
| European Central Bank | Governing Council | President Lagarde, Executive Board, Bundesbank, Banque de France, DNB, Banca d’Italia |
| Bank of England | Monetary Policy Committee | Governor Bailey, Deputy Governors, Chief Economist, External members |
| Bank of Japan | Policy Board | Governor Ueda, Deputy Governors, Policy Board members |
| Reserve Bank of Australia | Board | Governor Bullock, Deputy Governor, Treasury Secretary, Assistant Governor |
| Bank of Canada | Governing Council | Governor Macklem, Senior Deputy Governor, Deputy Governors |
| Reserve Bank of India | MPC | Governor, Deputy Governor, External members |
| Swiss National Bank | Governing Board | Chairman Schlegel, Vice Chairman, Member |
| People’s Bank of China | Governor and key deputies | Governor Pan Gongsheng, Deputy Governors |
How to read the index
A score is a summary, not a verdict. Two observations are worth keeping in mind:
- Direction matters more than absolute level. A committee at +1.5 that was at +3.0 a month ago is moving dovish, even if the headline reading still looks hawkish. The shift indicator captures this.
- The Chair sets the centre of gravity. A hawkish regional Fed President paired with a dovish Chair often nets out to neutral. We weight by voting status, not by office, so the Chair’s vote counts the same as any other voter — but their public language tends to anchor expectations more than other speakers.
For a full description of the scoring engine, the keyword library and known limitations, see the methodology page.
Hawks, Doves, and Why a Single Speech Can Move Markets
Central bankers are sorted into two informal camps by the way they talk about monetary policy. Hawks worry first about inflation. They favor higher rates, tighter policy, and are quick to flag wage pressures or rising prices as reasons to act. Doves worry first about unemployment and growth. They prefer lower rates, are more comfortable letting inflation run a little above target if it means more jobs, and emphasize the costs of cooling the economy too aggressively. Most officials slide along a spectrum rather than sitting at either extreme, and the same person can shift hawkish or dovish depending on the data.
When a Federal Reserve governor gives a speech, traders read it like a tea leaf. The question they are answering is: where is the Committee heading? If five of twelve members give noticeably more hawkish speeches in the same month, the market revises upward the probability of a rate hike at the next meeting, and bond prices fall, and the dollar strengthens. A single sentence — "I would not be surprised if we needed to do more" — has been enough to add 10 basis points to two-year Treasury yields within minutes.
Not every official's vote counts equally at every meeting. The FOMC has twelve voting members (the Chair, the six other Fed Governors, the New York Fed President, and four regional Fed Presidents who rotate annually). The other seven regional presidents attend the meetings and participate in discussion but do not vote that year. Their speeches still carry information — the rotation means they will vote again — but voting members move markets more sharply. The Hawkometer weights speakers accordingly.
Committee Dispersion, Voting Mechanics, and Sentiment Scoring Methodology
Cross-committee dispersion in revealed preferences is itself a tradable signal. The FOMC has historically exhibited tighter dot-plot dispersion than the ECB Governing Council, where the rotating-voting structure across 20+ NCB governors plus the six-member Executive Board produces wider underlying heterogeneity but more disciplined consensus communication, partly because individual GC members are constrained by the Eurosystem's collegial norms. BoE MPC dissent voting is published with the statement and runs at roughly a 15-25% individual-dissent rate over rolling windows — one of the highest among G10 central banks — providing a clean, structural read on internal disagreement that the FOMC's dot plot only approximates. Non-voting member speeches contain substantial signal during transition regimes because rotation reveals future voting preferences; the conventional view that non-voters should be discounted understates the option value of their stated frameworks.
Sentiment scoring approaches range from dictionary methods (Loughran-McDonald financial lexicons, custom hawk-dove keyword lists in the Shibata-Tanaka tradition) through topic models (LDA, structural topic models) to fine-tuned transformer models (FinBERT, monetary-policy-specific RoBERTa variants). Keyword scorers like the Hawkometer offer full traceability — every score decomposes into the specific phrases that produced it — at the cost of context-blindness; LSTM and transformer scorers capture context but introduce black-box uncertainty that complicates real-time market interpretation. The empirical literature (Hansen-McMahon-Prat 2018, Cieslak-Schrimpf 2019) documents post-meeting drift in implied policy paths driven measurably by speech sentiment between meetings: a one-standard-deviation hawkish shift in voter-weighted committee sentiment over a 30-day window predicts a 4-8bp rise in the OIS-implied policy rate two meetings out, with the largest effects during regime transitions and the smallest during clearly signposted cycles.
Committee scores at a glance
Voter-weighted 90-day rolling Hawkometer score for each committee. Hover any card for the underlying speaker breakdown.
Which committee is most hawkish right now?
Latest scored appearances
| Date | Bank | Speaker | Title | Type | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2, 2026 | ECB Official | Boris Vujčić: A European perspective on currency and convergence | Speech | 0.00 | |
| Jun 1, 2026 | Federal Reserve Official | Powell, Acceptance Remarks | Speech | 0.00 | |
| Jun 1, 2026 | Isabel Schnabel | Isabel Schnabel: From money market funds to stablecoins: lessons for central banks | Speech | 0.00 | |
| Jun 1, 2026 | Joachim Nagel | Joachim Nagel: The Case for a Restrictive Stance on Financial Stability | Speech | +7.21 | |
| Jun 1, 2026 | Sarah Breeden | Sarah Breeden: The Case for a Restrictive Stance on Growth Risks | Speech | +6.60 | |
| Jun 1, 2026 | Pan Gongsheng | Pan Gongsheng: Approaching the Easing Cycle — Growth Risks | Speech | -6.21 | |
| May 31, 2026 | Jerome Powell | Interview with Jerome Powell: Inflation Outlook | Interview | +8.85 | |
| May 31, 2026 | Philip Jefferson | Philip Jefferson: Approaching the Easing Cycle — Global Spillovers | Speech | -5.19 | |
| May 31, 2026 | Tiff Macklem | Tiff Macklem Press Conference Remarks: Growth Risks | Press Conference | +7.29 | |
| May 30, 2026 | Carolyn Rogers | Carolyn Rogers: Approaching the Easing Cycle — Labour Market | Speech | -4.91 | |
| May 29, 2026 | Federal Reserve Official | Bowman, A Framework for Practical Monetary Policy Decision Making | Speech | 0.00 | |
| May 29, 2026 | Megan Greene | Megan Greene Press Conference Remarks: Financial Stability | Press Conference | +1.52 | |
| May 29, 2026 | Sarah Hunter | Sarah Hunter Press Conference Remarks: Neutral Rate | Press Conference | +8.12 | |
| May 29, 2026 | Petra Tschudin | Petra Tschudin: The Case for a Restrictive Stance on Policy Transmission | Speech | +7.12 | |
| May 28, 2026 | Federal Reserve Official | Jefferson, Global Economic Developments and the U.S. Economy | Speech | 0.00 | |
| May 28, 2026 | Christine Lagarde | Christine Lagarde: When It Matters Most: Upholding Independence in Challenging Times | Speech | 0.00 | |
| May 28, 2026 | Piero Cipollone | Piero Cipollone: Money in the digital age | Speech | 0.00 | |
| May 28, 2026 | Lisa Cook | Lisa Cook Press Conference Remarks: Financial Stability | Press Conference | +0.61 | |
| May 28, 2026 | Frank Elderson | Frank Elderson: The Case for a Restrictive Stance on Global Spillovers | Speech | +8.50 | |
| May 28, 2026 | Andrew Hauser | Interview with Andrew Hauser: Policy Transmission | Interview | -2.66 |
Upcoming speaking calendar
About this index
The Hawkometer is a transparent, keyword-based scorer of central bank communication. Every score is fully traceable to the matched phrases that produced it. For full details on the scoring engine, voter weighting, rolling windows and known limitations, see the methodology page.
For the underlying data feed, see hawkometer.json in the site's data directory.