Over the quarter of a century with which this book is concerned,the UK has had an extraordinarily diverse experience of monetarypolicy and monetary regimes. Monetary policy has been transformed,from attempts to control broad money from the supply side with theuse of indirect controls on banks' lending, to an almost exclusivefocus on interest rates in a context of inflation targeting. Theexchange rate has at times been fixed, at other times almostperfectly flexible, and at other times again more or less managed.Meanwhile the real economy has experienced large variations ingrowth, together with what most observers have seen as a sharp riseand then a gradual decline in the NAIRU; inflation has variedbetween 25% and 2%. This is a book about the making of monetary policy in the UK,about how and why the monetary regimes changed over the period, andhow and why the monetary authorities took the decisions they didabout monetary growth, interest rates and the exchange rate. Itincludes separate chapters on monetary targeting, on policy in thesecond half of the 1980s, on the UK's brief membership of the ERM,on inflation targeting between 1993 and 1997, and on inflationtargeting with instrument independence since 1997.