Brad DeLong's article on Ben Bernanke, and the Republic of the Central Banker, is really, really good:Now go further back in history to 1844, and pick up the story that leads to Bernanke's current power and eminence. The place is London. The occasion is the debate in Britain's House of Commons over the terms on which the charter of the Bank of England -- the government's bank -- is to be renewed. The British government was then the largest economic institution the world had ever seen, and Britain, the fastest-growing economy ever seen: It was the age of the original Industrial Revolution, with the first large-scale automated factories, the first steamships, the first net of railroads, and the first time that any national economy had developed the chronic disease that we call the industrial business cycle.DeLong goes on to give some fascinating history, and then continues:Before the 19th century the causes of times of economic distress were obvious: war, famine, or disease, or a state bankruptcy -- a government that decided that it was simply not going to pay its debts. You could see what was going wrong and what had caused it.
The industrial business cycle was different -- and mysterious. Factories would be shut but not because of a lack of raw materials or of workers who wanted the jobs or of people who needed the products. Construction workers would be idle but not because the country had enough railroads or buildings or ports. People would be much poorer than they had been a couple of years before but not because an invading army had burned their cities or a plague of locusts had eaten their crops.
But just because central banking is independent of politics does not mean that politics is independent of central banking. "You may not be interested in the dialectic," Leon Trotsky once said, "but the dialectic is interested in you." That we now have independent central banks run by technocratic philosopher-princes like Ben Bernanke, and that we have these central banks because elected legislators and executive politicians do not want to challenge their authority or change their charters, has powerful implications for the freedom of action and choices that presidents and elected governments can make. Let me give three examples:You should go read the examples.
