Conti-Brown, Peter --- "The central banking century: an introduction to institutional central banking" [2018] ELECD 314; in Conti-Brown, Peter; Lastra, M. Rosa (eds), "Research Handbook on Central Banking" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 1

Book Title: Research Handbook on Central Banking

Editor(s): Conti-Brown, Peter; Lastra, M. Rosa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781784719210

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: The central banking century: an introduction to institutional central banking

Author(s): Conti-Brown, Peter

Number of pages: 5

Abstract/Description:

Historians are at the early stages of making sense of what historians call the long twentieth century, dating roughly from the late nineteenth century through the global financial crisis of 2008. It has been an extraordinary period, a time consumed by war, hot and cold; terrorism, in the skies and on the ground; successive revolutions in travel and communications; and the depths of multiple depressions and the heights of unparalleled prosperity. Trying to make sense of this history over the longue duree will be a consuming project for the foreseeable future. It is not an exaggeration, however, to put central banks at the center of the dizzying highs and exhausting lows. In many ways, the twentieth century was the century that central bankers built, for better and for worse. The advent of the modern, bureaucratised, mostly publicly controlled central bank was born not in seventeenth century Sweden, but in twentieth century America. And the concept of ‘central bank independence’, a defining concept, has echoes in earlier eras, but didn’t come into its maturity until well into the twentieth century. Central banks’ behavior during the 2008 crisis represents an apotheosis for this vision, not an exception.