It was not so much that they succeeded in time in driving out the demon of inflation (though they did), but that they did so by steadily depriving national governments of their initiative in domestic policy. This was a momentous shift, of greater consequence than was sometimes appreciated at the time. In the past, if a government opted for a ‘hard money’ strategy by adhering to the gold standard or declining to lower interest rates, it had to answer to its local electorate. But in the circumstances of the later 1970s, a government in London—or Stockholm, or Rome—facing intractable
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