Communism is dead, socialism has been repudiated by the socialists themselves, fewer and fewer Europeans are believing Christians but it seems that a fanatical new religion - also practised in America - has replaced all of them: Central Bankism. Like all religions, it has both a supreme god - hard money and a devil, inflation. Common sense suffices to oppose high inflation, and to fear hyper-inflation as the deadly disease of the currencies. But it takes the absolute faith of religion to refuse even very moderate inflation at the cost of immoderate unemployment and stagnation, as the Europeans have been doing, or to accept slow economic growth for years on end, as in the United States.

LRB 14 November 1996 | PDF Download