Are Modern Central Banks too Powerful for their Own Good? A Political Economy Approach to the Desirability and Limits of All-Powerful Central Banks

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the level of power enjoyed nowadays by central banks. In a first section I go through the different sources of this power, analyzing their evolution during the first decade following the 2008 global financial crisis. A second section assesses the pros and cons of this new status. Finally, I conclude by offering a political economic account of the overall desirability underpinning the choice of having extremely powerful central banks, a pattern that has been reaffirmed in the 2020 global COVID crisis.