Who’s to blame for the subprime crisis, not to mention the Internet bubble and even the global collapse, a decade ago, in emerging-markets currencies? The West’s leading central bankers, argues French economist Patrick Artus in his recently published The Arsonists: Central Banks Overtaken by Globalization. The chief economist of Paris-based investment bank Natixis and adviser to French prime minister François Fillon contends that most of today’s central bankers are unwisely obsessed with controlling broad gauges of consumer inflation when they should be focused on preventing asset price bubbles. “Central bankers have been in a fog since the last time it made sense to target broad inflation, which was in the 1980s,” says Artus.
