In the 80’s, in the public square the idea of a central bank independent from the influence of the political institutions is assumed as a qualifying point of a civilised country. Behind this tendency, we can identify the theory of the rational expectations of the economic agents. Lucas (1972) argued that the private sector behaves as if it knows the economic system. Consequently, if the monetary authority changes its rule, the private sector changes its actions vanishing the desired objectives of the applied monetary policy; Kydland and Prescott (1977) added that in a dynamic context the monetary authorities are thus incentivised to fail their announcements and this ‘temptation’ is incorporated in the rational expectations of the private sector introducing the problem of the ‘credibility’ of the monetary authorities.

For this reason, it is apt to have monetary power in the hands of technicians independent from the elections cycles (Nordhaus, 1975). Barro and Gordon (1983) and Rogoff (1985) elaborated models where the independent central banks pursue the long-term welfare, whereas the dependent ones the short-run political gains. Several studies found an inverse correlation between the central bank independence grade and inflation level (Bade and Parkin, 1988; Alesina and Summer, 1993); whereas other did not find a correlation between the central bank independence grade and the real output growth (Grilli, Masciandro and Tabellini, 1991).

After the recent economic crisis, a movement of revisitation of the doctrine of the central bank independence is particularly active. Allan Meltzer (2012) wrote that the FED lose its independence monetising debts through quantitative easing and this policy will create inflation sooner or later. At the Global Investment Conference in London on 26 July, 2012, Mario Draghi said that that “the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro” increasing the suspect of a subordination of the monetary policy to political goals. Several empirical studies based on updated data demonstrated no evidence on the relationship between the central bank independence and the variability of the inflation (Klomp and De Haan, 2010; Cargil 2013). The topic of central bank independence is today come back to discussion within the scholarly and public debate.

In this perspective, we study the 1981 abolition of the Italian central bank legal obligation to buy the government bonds unsold in the financial market. In this way, the Minister of Treasure Nino Andreatta and the Central Banker Carlo Azeglio Ciampi switched on the process that leaded to the Italian central bank independence (Epstein, Schor, 1989). This independency finished in the end of 1997, when Italy adhered to the just born European Central Bank.