Editing Central bank (section)

==Definition==
[[File:Walter Bagehot NPG cropped.jpg|thumb|right|[[Walter Bagehot]], influential 19th-century theorist of the economic role of central banks]]

The notion of central banks as a separate category from other banks has emerged gradually, and only fully coalesced in the 20th century. In the aftermath of [[World War I]], leading central bankers of the [[United Kingdom]] and the [[United States]] respectively, [[Montagu Norman]] and [[Benjamin Strong]], agreed on a definition of central banks that was both [[Positive statement|positive]] and [[Normative statement|normative]].{{R|DeCecco|p=4-5}} Since that time, central banks have been generally distinguishable from other financial institutions, except under [[Communism]] in so-called [[single-tier banking system]]s such as Hungary's between 1950 and 1987, where the [[Hungarian National Bank]] operated alongside three other major state-owned banks.<ref name=Lengyel>{{cite journal |title=The Hungarian Banking System in Transition |author=Imre Lengyel |journal=GeoJournal |volume=32 |date=April 1994 |issue=4 |pages=381–391 |doi=10.1007/BF00807358 |jstor=41146180 |bibcode=1994GeoJo..32..381L |s2cid=150554109 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41146180}}</ref> For earlier periods, what institutions do or do not count as central banks is often not univocal.

Correlatively, different scholars have held different views about the timeline of emergence of the first central banks. A widely held view in the second half of the 20th century has been that [[Stockholms Banco]] (est. 1657), as the original issuer of [[banknote]]s, counted as the oldest central bank, and that consequently its successor the [[Sveriges Riksbank]] was the oldest central bank in continuous operation, with the [[Bank of England]] as second-oldest and direct or indirect model for all subsequent central banks.<ref name="lse">{{cite book |author=Forrest Capie |author2=Charles Goodhart |author3=Norbert Schnadt |editor=Capie, Forrest |editor2=Fischer, Stanley |editor3=Goodhart, Charles |editor4=Schnadt, Norbert |chapter-url= http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/39606/|title= The Future of Central Banking: The Tercentenary Symposium of the Bank of England|chapter= The development of central banking|date= 1994|publisher= Cambridge University Press|location= Cambridge, UK|isbn= 9780521496346|access-date= 17 December 2012|url-access= registration|url= https://archive.org/details/futureofcentralb0000unse}}</ref> That view has persisted in some early-21st-century publications.<ref>{{cite journal |journal=Economic Commentary |title=A Brief History of Central Banks |author=Michael D. Bordo |url=https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentary/2007/ec-20071201-a-brief-history-of-central-banks |date=2007|issue=12/1/2007 }}</ref> In more recent scholarship, however, the issuance of banknotes has often been viewed as just one of several techniques to provide [[central bank money]], defined as financial money (in contrast to [[commodity money]]) of the highest quality. Under that definition, municipal banks of the late medieval and early modern periods, such as the [[Taula de canvi de Barcelona]] (est. 1401) or [[Bank of Amsterdam]] (est. 1609), issued central bank money and count as early central banks.<ref name=Bindseil>{{cite book|author=Ulrich Bindseil|title=Central Banking before 1800: A Rehabilitation|publisher=Oxford University Press|date=2019}}</ref>