Over the years, each of the central banks had acquired its distinctive architectural signature, somehow expressive of the institution’s character. While the Bank of England, for example, looked like a medieval citadel, the Banque de France like an aristocrat’s palace, the Reichsbank like a government ministry, for some reason—perhaps in a salute to those first international bankers, the merchant princes of Renaissance Italy—the New York Federal Reserve had chosen to dress itself up as a Florentine palazzo.
