What is the most important job in the world? President? Teacher? Parent? I suggest a post that would not feature on most people’s lists: central banker.
James Carville, who advised US president Bill Clinton, once quipped that he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market, able to intimidate anybody. But as Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King and more recently Mario Draghi (central bank heads in the US, UK and EU respectively) demonstrated during the financial crisis, even the bond markets must bow to the desires of a central banker with trillions to spend.
Thank goodness for such financial superpowers. The crisis-era central bankers have a strong claim to having prevented a rerun of the Great Depression. But the crisis is over, Mr Draghi is the last of that cohort still standing. Now in the final year of his term as European Central Bank president, he announced this week that eurozone quantitative easing would end this month.