This volume records one of the major events staged to mark the Tercentenary of the Bank of England – a Symposium on the Future of Central Banking, held at the Barbican Centre on 9 June 1994, and involving more than 130 Governors or former Governors from central banks around the world. It was, as the Prime Minister put it in his speech of welcome, ‘the largest gathering of central bankers ever to meet completely free of the restraining influence of finance ministers’.

On the previous day, most of those present at the Symposium had sat in the Barbican Hall, listening to Alexandre Lamfalussy, President of the European Monetary Institute, giving his Per Jacobbson lecture on ‘Central Banking in Transition’. This set the scene very usefully for our discussions at the Symposium, and although not strictly part of our proceedings, Professor Lamfalussy's lecture is included in this volume.

For the Symposium itself, the Bank had commissioned two major papers, one from Professor Charles Goodhart, of the London School of Economics, on ‘The Development of Central Banking’; and another from Professor Stanley Fischer, then at MIT but more recently Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, on ‘Modern Central Banking’. Our original thought had been to study central banking through time and then cross-sectionally, but in practice both authors deviated rather helpfully from their briefs. Charles Goodhart, in particular, together with his co-authors Forrest Capie and Norbert Schnadt, produced a major reference work comparing the origins and objectives of thirty-two central banks around the world. This is to be found in the appendices to his paper.