Last month, the Reserve Bank of Australia celebrated its 50th anniversary with a symposium gathering the great and the good of the profession in Sydney. One of the lessons many of the central bankers flagged was the need to pay greater attention to money and credit.

That central bankers need to have a conference to agree on the importance of money in setting monetary policy is, in one sense, amazing. The role of money in the economy - as a crucial leading indicator of inflation, of output growth