I was recently invited to contribute a blog post to the fascinating Fascism and Liberalism Blog of the International Karl Polanyi Society on the topic of central bank independence and the recent authoritarian threats against it. Many thanks to Solveig Degen for the invitation and to the International Karl Polanyi Society for publishing it.
“The contemporary authoritarian shift observed across the globe – led most visibly by the Trump administration in the United States – has amplified state cruelty, undermined the rule of law, and eroded trust in the resilience of democratic checks and balances. More than anything else, ours appears as a transitional era, structured around relentless challenges against existing institutions and a widespread sense of uncertainty. Ours is also an era of profound confusion, exacerbated by algorithmically designed distraction. In the context of such a dizzying bundle of uncertainties, the desire to return to a nostalgically constructed past ‘normality’ acquires particular force.
Recent responses to authoritarian challenges on central bank independence represent an exemplary case of this dynamic. Central bank independence is not a democratic alternative to authoritarianism, but an institutional form historically grounded on the insulation of monetary policy from democratic structures. Maintaining a misleading conceptualization of CBI as concomitant with democratic rule can only result in the reproduction of a framework largely responsible for the present predicament.”
The rest you can read here: https://www.karlpolanyisociety.com/2025/12/04/fl-blog-roufos-are-we-all-lisa-cook/