A closer look
Central bankers used to think they could control the economy simply by counting physical cash and bank reserves. Then the 1959 Radcliffe Report dropped a truth bomb: focusing on the narrow money supply is useless because credit makes the actual definition of money extremely fuzzy. They realized that 'broad liquidity'—basically the financial system's overall mood and willingness to borrow—was driving the ship, formally admitting that modern money is mostly institutional imagination.
