Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I am going to use my time to reflect on central bank independence and to point to where I believe the concept is incomplete and hence more challenged. I will use the term CBI hereon. Modern CBI emerged out of the high inflation era of the 1970s. This does not mean that the concept originated then, it has a much longer history. But in its modern form the 1970s was the experience that prompted change. I will use the Bank of England as a brief case study to illustrate the antecedents to the change. The first stop is 1802, when Henry Thornton wrote “An Enquiry into the Nature and ... (full story)