While rarely peripheral, central banks have seldom seemed so central. Increasingly, the crusade to crush inflation has propelled them centre stage. The words of Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, are now parsed more carefully than those of their political masters. Ultimately, as captured recently by Tim Harford in the Financial Times, the comforting certainty of their benign power is widely believed: ‘Friedman was oversimplifying when he declared that inflation was always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. But the statement is not far wrong and has a bracing…

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