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Monetary policy as economic warfare - Yannis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe's Deep Establishment, London, Bodley Head, 2017, 550 pp., £14.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-847-92446-9

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Yannis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe's Deep Establishment, London, Bodley Head, 2017, 550 pp., £14.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-847-92446-9

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

David Hollanders*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author: David Hollanders, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 19268, 1000 GG Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email: d.a.hollanders@uva.nl
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At least since the publication of ‘Rules rather than discretion’ by Nobel Prize winners Kydland and Prescott (1977), an undisputed principle in monetary economics is that central bankers should be politically independent. Politicians have an electoral incentive to jack-up the money supply to finance programmes the electorate favours, ignoring the inflation this will result in. Monetary policy is therefore best separated from fiscal policy, leaving the latter to politicians, while entrusting the former to central bankers, whose sole calling is to ensure moderate inflation and financial stability by determining the conditions (i.e., interest rate and collateral) under which private banks can borrow from the central bank. Although central banks’ independence might be undemocratic, it is nonetheless in the long-run interest of the citizenry.

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Book review
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2017

References

Kydland, F.E. and Prescott, E.C. (1977) Rules rather than discretion: The inconsistency of optimal plans. Journal of Political Economy, 85(3): 473–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar