In the 1940s this all became part of the war-time apparatus that essentially sought to run economies via direct intervention  17  I spoke at length about the role of a central bank as lender of last resort in the Melville Lecture at ANU in 2008, so will not cover it here in further detail (Stevens 2008).
18  Most central banks in existence today were established in the twentieth century. The price stability mandate typically came later – since until the 1930s countries were typically on some sort of link to gold and the problem of continual inflation was not expected to arise in such a world.