BIS Review 71/2007  1  indeed, as emphasised by Robert Lucas in the remarks he delivered at Otmar Issing’s Festschrift one year ago 4 , “[t]he first central banks to deal effectively with the 1970s inflation were the Bundesbank and the Swiss National Bank, and both did so in the mid-1970s by deliberate reductions in money growth rates.
In October 1979 the US Federal Reserve followed suit […].”  Monetary policy and monetary aggregates As stressed by Lucas, recalling the Swiss National Bank’s – and the Bundesbank’s, as well as a number of European central banks’, including Banque de France’s –acceptance, back in the 1970s, of the ultimately monetary nature of inflation, and their use of monetary means to bring it under control, is especially important today, when the relevance of monetary analysis for monetary policy is sometimes questioned.