The King’s Two Bodies

This looks like a good book:

Private outposts in the state and public outposts in finance, central banks have historically moved back and forth between very different institutional forms: private, public and various combinations of the two. Far from constituting a rational-functionalist formation, they have performed widely diverse and often barely related functions—from the administration of state debt to the issuing of currency and the supervision of private banks—cobbled together more or less ad hoc according to political expediency… Central banks, Vogl argues, constitute a fourth power, overshadowing legislature, executive and judiciary, and integrating financial-market mechanisms into the practice of government.

Central banks’ claim to autonomous authority is based on their assumed, and asserted, technical competence. As they and their aficionados in the media and in economics departments are fond of telling us, central bankers know things about the economy that normal people, inevitably overwhelmed by such complexity, cannot even begin to fathom. … Central bankers themselves have always been aware … that what they sell to the public as a quasi-natural science is in fact nothing more than intuitive empathy, an ability acquired by long having moved in the right circles to sense how capital will feel, good or bad, about what a government is planning to do in relation to financial markets. (Economic theory is best understood as an ontological reification of capitalist sensitivities represented as natural laws of a construct called ‘the economy’.) At critical moments, such as when the Bank of England went off the gold standard in 1931 …, central banking relies on the trained intuition of great men and their capacity to make others believe that they know what they’re doing, even when they don’t. At a university event in London almost a decade after the 2008 crash, Alan Greenspan was remembered by an enthusiastic admirer as having had ‘a complete model of the American economy in his body’.