ABSTRACT
Introduction Regime changes are always exciting, and grist for analysis by the interested commentator. There have been several such regime changes in Central Banking during the last few years, a most exciting period for someone like myself, not only in my capacity as a professional observer of Central Banking but now also as a participant. The Chancellor's initiatives in his first month in office in 1997, to give the Bank of England operational independence, and then subsequently to centralize all financial supervision, including the supervision of banks, in a Financial Services Authority (FSA), caused the most abrupt changes to the functions and structure of the Bank, probably since its foundation. But, of course, the extent and scale of this regime change, though in my view the most important economic developments of the incoming Labour government, have been dwarfed by the move to a single currency, the euro, with its associated European System of Central Banks (ESCB) within the euro area.
