The Great Inflation: The Rebirth of Modern Central Banking.

• Position: Bureau Books

The Great Inflation: The Rebirth of Modern Central Banking, edited by Michael Bordo and Athanasios Orphanides, is available from the University of Chicago Press in July 2013.

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policymakers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity.

This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and 1980s, during which time many nations experienced rising inflation, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, there has been considerable debate on the immediate cause of the period's rise in inflation. Among the areas explored are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this has had, both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. In this volume, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding...