The Bank of England and Neoliberal Inflation Politics in 'The Great Moderation'

在2019冠状病毒病（COVID-19，即2019冠状病毒病）疫情之后，对通胀的恐惧作为一个紧迫的担忧重新进入了流行话题。上一次通货膨胀具有紧迫的流行和学术意义是在20世纪70年代石油危机和“滞胀”的影响改变了全球北方的政治秩序，颠覆了战后凯恩斯主义的解决方案。但自冷战结束以来，以及一系列新的中央银行应对通胀战略的制定（在英国，包括“通胀目标”政策（1992年）和法律上的中央银行独立性（1997年）），它在很大程度上被认为是“驯服”的。因此，它作为一个突出的政治经济问题被隐藏了近30年。重新政治化和重新质疑这些名义上的政策成功，这个项目将研究这套“稳定”（反通胀）政策在英国的创建作为一个重要的和特别被忽视的一套关键的新自由主义干预英格兰银行在“大温和”。这些稳定政策的“成功”可以通过在多大程度上来衡量-在现在大量的研究新自由主义发展的学术文献中（伯奇，2017年给出了一项调查），它们作为新自由主义时代政策处方和干预措施的一套特别不容置疑的地位在很大程度上被忽视了。研究货币政策的正统经济学文献认为，低通胀是一个成功实现的无可争议的目标，尽管对如何实现存在争议（Benati，2007）。与此同时，试图以制度为基础理解货币政策制定的文献，如Kynaston（2017）或Capie（2010），并没有在更广泛的政治经济含义中解释政策，而是仅从狭义的制度角度描述其发展。最近的一些研究考虑了通货膨胀在各种文化斗争中所起的作用。在美国，它在公民权利和福利冲突中的作用;帮助新保守主义者和新自由主义者之间建立一个共同的“亲家庭”政策平台（库珀，2018）。平行的工作已经确定了它在英国发挥的作用，在以诺鲍威尔（Shilliam，2021）的政治中巩固了新自由主义的种族主义和英国民族主义渲染。然而，通货膨胀仍然是这些分析的背景或框架问题。因此，对英国新自由主义稳定的理解，在一套具体的政策工具方面，随着历史的发展和展开，还没有得到充分的参与。确实存在的（Best，2019年和2020年）虽然有价值，但只关注20世纪80年代初相对狭窄的时期。此外，这项工作并没有详细研究产生它的知识和体制过程。它也没有注意到这些政策制度的分配影响，这些政策制度有利于某些经济行为者，而不是其他人-这是早期围绕稳定和通货膨胀的政治经济学研究的一个关键见解（例如Maier，1987）。至关重要的是，这项工作最终认为理所当然的stabilisationary项目的合法性，即使它质疑的方法来实现它。在这种情况下，这项研究涉及以下问题：什么因素-文化，知识和物质-导致稳定政策成为货币正统的基石，在20世纪90年代在英国的方式？此外，2000年前后，这一点是如何在思想上和体制上根深蒂固的？参与其中的行为者--尤其是央行行长--如何理解和构想这一政策过程，特别是其政治、社会和分配影响？为什么以及如何处理货币和财政政策的其他方法被忽视，靠边站和忽视？“大温和”的稳定是如何调解这一时期发生的政治经济转变的？

Introduction Fear of inflation has re-entered popular discourse as an urgent concern in the wake of covid-19. The last time inflation was of urgent popular and academic significance came as the effects of the 1970's oil-crisis and 'stagflation' changed the political order in the Global North, upending the post-war Keynesian settlement. But since the end of the Cold War, and the institution of a raft of new central bank strategies to deal with inflation (in the UK, including 'inflation-targeting' policy (1992) and de jure central bank independence (1997)) it had been largely thought to have been 'tamed'. As such it has been hidden for almost 30 years as a salient political-economic concern. Repoliticising and reinterrogating these notional policy successes, this project will examine the creation of this set of 'stabilisation' (anti-inflationary) policies in the UK as a significant and peculiarly overlooked set of key neoliberal interventions by The Bank of England during 'the Great Moderation'. The 'success' of these stabilisation policies can be measured by the extent to which - in a now vast academic literature investigating the development of neoliberalism (Birch, 2017 gives a survey), their status as a particularly unquestionable set of neoliberalera policy prescriptions and interventions has largely been left nexamined. Orthodox economic literature which examines monetary policy takes the view that low inflation was an unobjectionable goal successfully attained, albeit with debate about how (Benati, 2007). Meanwhile the literature which attempts towards an institutionally-grounded understanding of monetary policy-making, such as Kynaston (2017) or Capie (2010) does not situate policy within broader political-economic implications, but describes its development only in narrow institutional terms. Some recent work has considered the role that inflation hasplayed in a variety of cultural struggles. In the US, in its role in conflict over civil rights and welfare; aiding the construction of a shared 'pro-family' policy platform between neoconservatives and neoliberals (Cooper, 2018). Parallel work has identified the role it played in the UK in undergirding the racist and British-nationalist rendering of neoliberalism in the politics of Enoch Powell (Shilliam, 2021). However, inflation remains something of a background or framing concern in these latter analyses. Thus, the understanding of neoliberal stabilisation in the UK in terms of a concrete set of policy instruments, with a historical development and unfolding has not been sufficiently engaged. That which does exist (Best, 2019 and 2020) though valuable, only looks at a relatively narrow period in the early 1980's. Further, this work does not look at the intellectual and institutional processes which gave rise to it in any detail. Nor does it pay attention to the distributionary implications of these policy regimes, which favour certain sets of economic actors over others - a key insight of earlier political economy work around stability and inflation (e.g. Maier, 1987). Crucially, this work ultimately takes for granted the legitimacy of the stabilisationary project even if it problematises the methods used to achieve it. In this context this research engages the following issues: what factors - cultural, intellectual and material - led to stabilisation policy becoming the cornerstone of monetary orthodoxy in the way it did in Britain in the 1990s? Further, how did this become intellectually and institutionally entrenched into and beyond the year 2000? And how did the actors involved - especially central bankers- understand and conceive of this policy process, especially in regard to its political, social and distributional implications? Why and how were other ways of approaching monetary and fiscal policies ignored, sidelined and overlooked? And how did the stabilisation of 'the great moderation' mediate the political-economic shifts which took place in this period?