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

简介新冠肺炎之后，对通胀的恐惧作为一个紧迫的问题重新进入了流行的话语。上一次通胀具有紧迫的流行和学术意义是在1970年S石油危机和滞胀的影响下改变了全球北部的政治秩序，颠覆了战后凯恩斯主义的解决方案。但自冷战结束以来，以及央行制定了一系列新的应对通胀的策略(在英国，包括1992年的通胀目标制政策和1997年的法定央行独立性)，人们在很大程度上一直认为通胀已被“驯服”。因此，近30年来，它一直被隐藏起来，成为一个突出的政治经济问题。这个项目将这些名义上的政策成功重新政治化并重新审问，将考察英国这套“稳定”(反通胀)政策的创建，作为英格兰银行在“大缓和”时期的一套重要的、特别被忽视的关键新自由主义干预措施。这些稳定政策的“成功”可以通过以下程度来衡量--在研究新自由主义发展的大量学术文献中(Birch，2017给出了一项调查)，它们作为一套特别毋庸置疑的新自由主义政策处方和干预措施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，低通胀是成功实现的一个并不令人反对的目标，尽管对如何实现这一目标存在争议(Benati，2007)。与此同时，试图从制度上理解货币政策制定的文献，如凯纳斯顿(Kynaston)(2017)或卡皮(Capie)(2010)，并没有将政策置于更广泛的政治经济含义中，而只是从狭隘的制度层面描述了政策的发展。最近的一些工作考虑了通货膨胀在各种文化斗争中所起的作用。在美国，它在民权和福利冲突中扮演的角色；帮助在新保守派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年)。平行工作确定了它在英国在支持伊诺克·鲍威尔(Shilliam，2021)政治中的种族主义和英国民族主义呈现的新自由主义方面所发挥的作用。然而，在这些后一种分析中，通胀仍然是一个背景或框架性的担忧。因此，从一套具体的政策工具的角度来理解英国的新自由主义稳定，以及历史上的发展和展开，一直没有得到充分的理解。那些确实存在的东西(最好的，2019年和2020年)虽然有价值，但只考察了20世纪80年代初S时期的一个相对较窄的时期。此外，这部著作没有详细研究产生它的智力和制度过程。它也没有注意到这些政策制度的分配影响，这些政策制度偏爱某些经济行为者，而不是其他经济行为者--这是早期政治经济学围绕稳定和通胀工作的一个关键见解(例如，Maier，1987)。至关重要的是，这项工作最终理所当然地认为稳定计划的合法性是理所当然的，即使它使实现稳定计划的方法出现问题。在这种背景下，这项研究涉及以下问题：哪些因素--文化、智力和物质--导致稳定政策成为货币正统理论的基石，就像上世纪90年代在英国所做的那样？此外，在2000年之前和之后，这是如何在智力和制度上根深蒂固的？参与其中的参与者--尤其是央行官员--是如何理解和构想这一政策过程的，尤其是在其政治、社会和分配影响方面？货币和财政政策的其他方式为何以及如何被忽视、排挤和忽视？“大温和派”的稳定是如何促成这一时期发生的政治经济转变的呢？

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?