1、588 单词， 3200 英文字符，中文 1000 字 Central banks in a global economy In the world of central banking, the importation of monetary policy from another country has been a growing trend in recent years. For some years now, countries such as Austria and the Netherlands imported their monetary policy from Frank
2、furt. In the 1990s, Argentina joined Panama, Hong Kong, and others in the importation of their monetary policy from the Federal Reserve System. Once 11 sovereign countries of Western Europe implemented their plan to shift monetary policy decision-making from the autonomous national central banks to
3、a newly created supranational central bank in route to phasing out the 11 national currencies in favor of a single monetary standard to be used by all the trickle of countries giving up any notion of monetary autonomy and national currency has started to become a flood. Just this year Ecuador began
4、to phase out the sucre in favor of the U.S. dollar (see Economist, 2000). Aside from national pride, the idea that a nation-state should have its own currency and independent monetary policy was intellectually supported by the idea that some positive rate of inflation was optimal. Even when economis
5、ts would not defend deliberate debasement of the currency, authorities often rationalized inflation on grounds of political necessity, especially in the face of often large and growing national debts. The political expediency of the unlegislated tax of inflation seems to have had a near universal ap
6、peal. Over time, the political benefits of deliberate inflation have been counterbalanced by financial innovations in domestic and global markets. In fact, the balance appears now to have shifted such that the costs associated with rising inflation outweigh any residual benefits. First central bankers, then ministers of finance, and finally politicians generally are finding that a reputation for tolerance of inflation is undesirable. Twenty years ago, it was fairly common to hear even p
