This book is the first complete survey of the evolution of monetary institutions and practices in Western countries from the Middle Ages to today. It radically rethinks previous attempts at a history of monetary institutions by avoiding institutional approach and shifting the focus away from the Anglo-American experience. Previous histories have been hamstrung by the linear, teleological assessment of the evolution of central banks. Free from such assumptions, Ugolini’s work offers bankers and policymakers valuable and profound insights into their institutions. Using a functional approach, Ugolini charts an historical trajectory longer and broader than any other attempted on the subject. Moving away from the Anglo-American perspective, the book allows for a richer (and less biased) analysis of long-term trends. The book is ideal for researchers looking to better understand the evolution of the institutions that underlie the global economy.

This 2005 treatment compares the central banks of Britain and the United States.

The Evolution of Central Banks employs a wide range of historical evidence and reassesses current monetary analysis to argue that the development of non-profit-maximizing and noncompetitive central banks to supervise and regulate the commercial banking system fulfils a necessary and natural function. Goodhart surveys the case for free banking, examines the key role of the clearing house in the evolution of the central bank, and investigates bank expansion and fluctuation in the context of the clearing house mechanism. He concludes that it is the noncompetitive aspect of the central bank that is crucial to the performance of its role. Goodhart addresses the questions of deposit insurance and takes up the "club theory" approach to the central bank. Included in the historical study of their origins are 8 European central banks, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Board of the United States.

Offers a comprehensive analysis of the historical experiences of monetary policymaking of the world's largest central banks. Written in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the central bank of Sweden, Sveriges Riksbank. Includes chapters on other banks around the world written by leading economic scholars.

Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better incorporate academic knowledge and thinking into the conduct of monetary policy, and he tells scholars how they might reorient their research to be more attuned to reality and thus more useful to central bankers. Based on the 1996 Lionel Robbins Lectures, this readable book deals succinctly, in a nontechnical manner, with a wide variety of issues in monetary policy. The book also includes the author's suggested solution to an age-old problem in monetary theory: what it means for monetary policy to be "neutral."

Curzio had one of the most fertile and original minds ever to be deployed on questions relating, first, to the interactions between Central Banks, private sector financial intermediaries and the government, and second to the working of the international monetary system in general, and to the role of the IMF specifically within that. His approach has been to apply a theory of history , which provides a beautifully written and illuminating book, much easier and nicer to read and more rounded than the limited mathematical models that have so monopolised academia in recent decades. From the foreword by Charles A.E. Goodhart Curzio Giannini s history of the evolution of central banks illustrates how the most relevant institutional developments have taken place at times of widespread confidence crises and in response to deflationary pressures. The eminent and highly-renowned author provides an analytical perspective to study the evolution of central banking as an endogenous response to crisis and to the ever increasing needs of economic growth. The key argument of the analysis is that crucial innovations in the payment technology (from the invention of coinage to the development of electronic money) could not have taken place without an institution i.e. the central bank - that could preserve confidence in the instruments used as money. According to Curzio Giannini s neo-institutionalist methodological approach, social institutions are, in fact, essential in the coordination of individual decisions as they minimize transaction costs, overcome information asymmetries and deal with incomplete contracts. This enlightening and revealing historical theory perspective on central banking will prove a thought-provoking read for academic and institutional economists, economic historians, and economic policymakers involved in the task of crafting a new institutional arrangement for central banking in the globalized economy.

The book analyses the establishment of De Nederlandsche Bank and its early development as a case study to test competing theories on the historical development of central banking. It is shown that the establishment of DNB can be explained by both the fiscal theory and the financial stability theory. Later development makes clear that the financial stability role of DNB prevailed. DNB ́s bank notes were not forced onto the public and competition was fierce. A prudent and independent stance was necessary to be able to play its intended role. This meant that DNB played a modest role in the Amsterdam money market until 1852. By 1852 it had established itself to become the central bank. By then its bank notes had become generally accepted and it could start to operate as a reserve bank. Also the market context had changed dramatically, its competitors had been driven out of the market and several credit institutions had become customers of DNB. "On the occasion of the Nederlandsche Bank's 200th Anniversary, it is good to have a new, and an extremely good, history of its founding and first fifty years of operation. The only previous account of this period of the DNB's history was legalistic and did not sufficiently place the Bank ́s development in its wider context. Uittenbogaard's book provides a much broader, and better, story of the personnel, economics, and finance of the DNB at this juncture." - Charles Goodhart, LSE.