The Bundesbank was the first central bank worldwide to adopt monetarist money supply targeting

Evidence

A second episode in German economic history indicating the continuous political influence of economists organized around the infrastructure of German neoliberalism was the period of the “monetarist turn” in the early 1970s after a short period of “German Keynesianism” in the late 1960s. Janssen analyzed the “counter-revolution in German monetary theory”—i.e. the theoretical debate among German economists about Milton Friedman’s monetarist theory—and found that fifteen, mainly young, German economists introduced monetarism into German economics. He concluded that “the revolt of the thirty-somethings,” especially from 1970 to 1976, initiated the monetarist anti-Keynesian revolution in German economics. This initiative resulted in the monetarist turn of the German Bundesbank, which was the first central bank worldwide to introduce monetarist money supply targeting as suggested by Friedman. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 630

Categorization

• CANDY: A neat trivia fact: the German Bundesbank, not the US Fed, was first to implement Friedman’s money-supply targeting.
• XREF: connects to: Western Europe diverged from the floating-rate norm via the Bundesbank and EMS — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 448