Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World
Juliet Johnson
Abstract
This book explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. The book argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped their ideas about the role of central banks, and helped them develop modern tools of central banking. The detailed comparative studies of central bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan span from the birth o ... More
This book explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. The book argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped their ideas about the role of central banks, and helped them develop modern tools of central banking. The detailed comparative studies of central bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan span from the birth of the campaign in the late 1980s to the challenges faced by central bankers after the global financial crisis. As the comfortable certainties of the past collapse around them, today's central bankers in the postcommunist world and beyond find themselves torn between allegiance to their transnational community and its principles on the one hand and their increasingly complex and politicized national roles on the other.
Keywords:
central banks,
postcommunist,
cash cow,
monetary guardian,
central banking community,
central bankers,
central banking
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501700224 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501700224.001.0001 |
