This chapter details how Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, in partnership with Benjamin Strong of the FRBNY, turned ad hoc wartime cooperation into a formal agenda. The paired ideas that national central banks should be autonomous, and that they should cooperate with each other, were first spelled out in a private “manifesto” that Norman circulated among fellow central bankers in 1921. Central bank cooperation was internationally recognized as a principle at the 1922 Genoa Conference, and it was also put into practice. Cooperation between central banks began primarily as informational cooperation, which includes not only the sharing of information but also the sharing and propagation of worldviews. An international network of central banks thus developed out of the war, as did the world's first truly coordinated system of international monetary policy. In these and other ways, financial globalization surged to a new level in the 1920s.
Financial Globalization and Monetary Policy