He did not start his career as a central banker – he often joked, particularly with those he considered not concrete enough, about his early job as a clothes seller – but in the end he incarnated the quintessential and all-round central banker as nobody else did, though always in an original way.
He viewed central banks as complex and multifaceted financial institutions pursuing the public good along several interconnected paths. It is the polar opposite of the notion, prevailing in the years prior to the current crisis, of a single-minded and ring-fenced authority regulating interest rates just to achieve stable prices.