Opting Out of the Great Inflation: German Monetary Policy after the Breakdown of Bretton Woods

This chapter explains the monetary targeting framework followed by the German Bundesbank from 1974 to 1998, and relates the Bundesbank's success in maintaining price stability and in anchoring inflation expectations to its strategy. The goal is to provide a historical account of the conduct of monetary policy, focusing especially on the first ten years of monetary targeting, from 1975 until the middle of the 1980s, when price stability was virtually reached in Germany.