The Global Financial Crisis has reshuffled the cards for central banks throughout the world. In the wake of the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, this volume traces the evolution of modern central banking over the last fifty years. It takes in the inflationary chaos of the 1970s and the monetarist experiments of the 1980s, eventually leading to the New Monetary Consensus, which took shape in the 1990s and prevailed until 2007. The book then goes on to review the limitations placed on monetary policy in the aftermath of the global meltdown, arguing that the financial crisis has shaken the new monetary consensus.