The Central Banks Hardcover – February 1, 1995

This is a very illuminating, and entertaining, discussion of the history, recent trajectory (as of mid 1990's), and prospects (as seen at that time) of the "national central bank" movement. I bought the used copy to confirm a "too good to be true" quotation attributed to Paul Volker, who wrote this in the Forward to the volume:'It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. If the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with `free banking.' The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy." 'So why are academic libraries dumping this book from their shelves (my first used copy came from the Harvard University library system, the second from the University of Colorado), when there is not even a new edition to replace it? Perhaps the notion of "down the memory hole" is more than a mere paranoid vision plagiarized from Orwell's "1984".