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The Monetary Policy Committee meets eight times a year. It considers inflation data, employment figures, energy prices, global supply chains, and the accumulated weight of economic modelling produced by some of the best-paid analysts in the public sector. What it does not currently consider — and this is a gap that has been noted before in these pages — is entrail evidence. Whether that oversight will one day be corrected is a matter for another discussion. In the meantime, practitioners are left to conduct their own readings and draw their own conclusions, which is, if anything, a more honest arrangement.
This article sets out a working framework for applying haruspicy to questions of central bank policy — specifically the decisions made by the Bank of England regarding interest rates, quantitative easing, and monetary tightening. It assumes familiarity with standard hepatoscopic technique. Those still developing their foundational skills may find it useful to first review A Beginner’s Guide to Becoming a Haruspex before proceeding.
Why Monetary Policy Is a Legitimate Domain for Haruspicy
There is sometimes a tendency among newer practitioners to treat haruspicy as suited only to personal or immediate questions — health, relationships, near-term decisions. This is an understandable instinct but a limiting one. The entrails do not operate on a narrow temporal or thematic register. The liver in particular has long been understood as a surface on which large-scale systemic forces express themselves, often more legibly than they do in the data releases and forward guidance that professional economists spend careers interpreting.
Central bank policy is, at its core, a question about collective confidence: whether the institutions that govern money believe the future will be stable, inflationary, or contracting. These are precisely the kinds of collective psychic states that manifest in organ tissue. A reading conducted the morning before a scheduled MPC announcement is not a replacement for reading the minutes — it is a parallel and complementary source of information, one that operates beneath the level of conscious institutional communication.
It is worth acknowledging that the heart, for all its cultural prestige, is not the most reliable organ for this kind of work. As discussed in Unreliable Organs: When the Heart Gets in the Way, cardiac readings tend to reflect emotional rather than structural conditions. For policy analysis, the liver and the spleen are considerably more informative.
The Liver as Macroeconomic Indicator
In classical hepatoscopy, the liver is divided into regions corresponding to different domains of influence. For contemporary economic readings, a number of practitioners have found it productive to map these regions onto the principal concerns of modern monetary policy: price stability, employment, credit conditions, and external balance.
The right lobe, traditionally associated with institutional authority and the disposition of governing powers, is the natural starting point for any Bank of England reading. Firmness and uniform colouration here have historically corresponded with periods of policy confidence — the MPC moving decisively in a clear direction. Pallor, uneven texture, or visible stress marks in this region tend to precede periods of internal disagreement or delayed decision-making. Practitioners who tracked readings in the period leading up to the Bank’s prolonged hesitation on rate rises in 2021–22 have reported consistent anomalies in precisely this region during the preceding months.
Liver spots — the small surface markings that attract a good deal of commentary in general practice — should be assessed carefully in economic readings. Their distribution matters more than their individual presence. A cluster concentrated in the gallbladder region may indicate liquidity pressure. Spots distributed evenly across the lobes suggest a more diffuse systemic condition, consistent with broad inflationary environments where no single sector is the primary driver. For a more detailed treatment of surface marking interpretation, see Dream Symbols and Their Correlation With Liver Spots, which, despite its title, contains a useful appendix on marking typology applicable to economic contexts.
The Spleen and the Question of Institutional Confidence
The spleen is underused in applied economic haruspicy, and this is a missed opportunity. In traditional frameworks, the spleen governs rumination, reservation, and the processing of accumulated difficulty. In monetary terms, this maps fairly directly onto the concept of institutional credibility — the slow-burning question of whether the public and financial markets believe the central bank means what it says.
A healthy, well-proportioned spleen reading is consistent with a period in which the Bank’s forward guidance is being taken seriously. Spleen readings that present as enlarged or congested have, in documented case work, preceded episodes of credibility strain — periods in which the Bank’s stated targets and its actual behaviour have diverged sufficiently to generate market scepticism.
The Spleen as Compass: Navigating Spiritual Crossroads offers a broader framework for spleen interpretation that, while written with personal decision-making in mind, contains methodological principles directly applicable to institutional analysis.
Intestinal Readings and Longer-Term Structural Conditions
Where the liver speaks to current conditions and near-term institutional disposition, the intestines are better suited to questions about structural economic trajectory. The length, colour, and motility of the intestines in a reading have long been associated with questions of continuity, throughput, and the capacity of a system to process what is being asked of it.
For central bank analysis, this translates most naturally to questions about the underlying economy’s capacity to absorb policy decisions. A rate rise is not merely a number — it passes through a system, affecting mortgage holders, business lending, consumer confidence, and eventually employment. The intestines, read carefully, can give a practitioner a sense of whether that system is in a condition to absorb pressure or whether it is already at the limit of what it can process without disruption.
Practitioners working on readings of this kind should ensure their spleenfold interpretation is consistent with intestinal findings before drawing conclusions. The two organs in combination provide a more reliable picture of structural conditions than either does alone. The article on Spleenfold Mechanics: An Overlooked Indicator is required reading for anyone undertaking economic haruspicy at this level of detail.
Practical Considerations for Policy Readings
A few procedural notes for practitioners conducting readings with a specific focus on Bank of England policy decisions.
Timing matters. Readings conducted within 48 hours of a scheduled MPC announcement tend to carry stronger signal than those conducted at other points in the cycle. The collective intention of the Committee — already formed, not yet public — appears to be detectable in this window. Readings conducted immediately after an announcement are useful for verification and calibration but should not be treated as predictive.
Animal selection is worth considering carefully. Bovine readings have traditionally been associated with institutional and civic matters, and there is a reasonable theoretical basis for preferring cattle organs for questions of this kind. That said, ovine readings have produced credible results in this area and are considerably more practical for most independent practitioners working without commercial-scale facilities.
Document your findings consistently. Economic haruspicy is still a developing applied field, and the quality of collective knowledge depends on practitioners keeping accurate records — animal, date, conditions, interpretation, and subsequent outcome. If you are interested in contributing readings to the growing evidence base in this area, the site’s case studies section welcomes submissions.
The Bank of England will continue to make its decisions based on the information available to it. Practitioners who develop reliable method in this area are not competing with that process — they are supplementing it, working in a register that institutional economics cannot access. That is, all things considered, a reasonable division of labour.
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