It is the first time the bank's fan chart, which projects where inflation is likely to lie nine times out of ten, has encompassed deflation.

ECONOMIST: Debt and deflation

The trouble is that this centres the fan chart on the mode of the distribution (the single likeliest outcome), and not necessarily on the median (the value that divides the outcomes, ranked by size, exactly in two) or the mean (the sum of the outcomes divided by the number of outcomes).

ECONOMIST: A la mode | The