The Banking & Monetary Policy Group of the Global Policy Institute was set up following a successful City conference held at the Bloomberg Centre in April 2008 on Reforming the City. This was published as book in 2009 (Forum Press). The Committee’s wider frame of study is the place of finance and international banking in redefining and reducing the enormous potential of globalism – as flagged up in 1997 by Martin Albrow’s The Global Age – to a narrow economic perspective.

The narrow account of globalization is defined by financial flows between the main financial centres. This is now challenged by the emergence of regional blocs, which will increasingly ensure that money creation and financial capital is used more discriminately to favour geopolitical interests and local populations. Prolonged quantitative easing has become a tool of devaluation and increased medium term insecurity, most notably in emerging markets. It has also increased wealth inequalities, inflated asset prices, and damaged the relationship between saving and productive investment.

The Committee has recently published Federal Central Banks. A Comparison of the US Federal Reserve with the European Central Bank (Forum Press, 2018). The book conducts:

• A detailed examination of the history, design and operation of central banking in the United States and in the European Union.
• The contradiction between the centralizing features of banking and monetary policy and the political expectations of pluralist federal democracy is explored.
• Regional economic disparities are seen to be amplified by modern ‘independent’ central banking.
• The response of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve is rated as superior to immature Eurozone institutions. Both underperformed in ignoring fiscal-monetary solutions.

Central banks will remain a focus of the Committee as macro-monetary policy is increasingly placed in the hands of central bankers with weak democratic accountability.