We’re at the dawn of a revolution in central banking, in which the likes of the Bank of Canada, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, and eventually the European Central Bank (ECB) will exert more influence over the global economy than government, business or consumers.

It’s a quiet revolution. And it’s the inevitable consequence of our currently difficult times. If not for the near-collapse of the world financial system in 2008-09, and the seemingly intractable financial crisis in Europe, central bankers would have remained the unseen players who for decades devoted themselves mostly to controlling inflation.

But in these extraordinarily troubled times, central bankers have become the rescuers of last resort. That new role has been forced on them. And while they are emboldened, they still feel a trace of reluctance in their unprecedented exertion of power and influence.

Canada’s Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, is one of the most widely esteemed of Canadians. And Carney is so well regarded abroad that British punters believe Carney to be the odds-on favourite to be poached by Britain to replace a Bank of England governor who is soon to retire.

Elsewhere, though, central bankers don’t enjoy such public and leadership-class confidence.

The ECB, even under the more enlightened leadership of its new head, Italy’s Mario Draghi, remains painfully slow to take the steps required to stimulate crippled economies in desperate need of shoring up, by strengthening both the public finances of Greece, Spain and so on, and injecting liquidity in the Continent’s reserve-poor largest banks. Yet the ECB’s haplessness, its every progressive impulse checked by a Germany that is among the world’s most fiscally-conservative countries, is proof that the revolution of more activist central banking is overdue.

The U.S. Fed, and more specifically its chairman, Ben Bernanke, are in the vanguard of this transformation. As a college professor, Bernanke had argued that central banks should act more aggressively on job creation, the neglected part of their dual mandate of keeping inflation in check and spurring job growth. Job creation was so disdained as an issue for the Fed that official mention of it in Fed policy statements didn’t appear until late in 2008, at the peak of a Wall Street meltdown that the Fed correctly assumed would prove ruinous to the wider economy for years to come.

Bernanke’s Fed has pumped more than a trillion dollars into the U.S. economy since 2008 by purchasing U.S. government debt. And early in the crisis, it formed a coalition with the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England and the Bank of Switzerland to bailed out the giant banks that run the global clearing system, ensuring that your paycheck clears and that ATMs dispense cash. At the height of the crisis, Bernanke famously said that if the central bankers didn’t promptly embrace unorthodox rescue measures, “We won’t have an economy tomorrow.”

It should never have come to that, of course. And Bernanke has become determined that it never will again by helping create a new world order of global finance. It will be one in which central banks are not only at battle stations when the cupidity of private-sector financiers culminates in disaster, a phenomenon that used to strike every decade or so, but most recently followed just six years of stability.

The new order will also have central banks preoccupied with economic stimulus in good and bad times alike, with a principal goal of job creation. “It’s a reimagining of Fed policy,” John E. Silva, chief economist at U.S. mega-bank Wells Fargo & Co., told the Washington Post this week. “It’s a much stronger commitment to focus on unemployment.”

Currently, 1.4 million Canadians are out of work. The number for the U.S. is 12.5 million. But it rises to 23 million when accounting for folks who have given up looking for work or have found only part-time employment. Solving that crisis is formidable. Yet in the eight years of the Clinton administration the U.S. created, as it happens, 23 million new jobs. And low borrowing costs maintained by the U.S. Fed played a big role in that record job creation.

Bernanke has just over a year remaining in one of the most turbulent tenures endured by any central banker. He’s using it to achieve primacy for the Fed in restoring and maintaining robust U.S. economic health. By extension, the Fed’s muscular practices will migrate, given the towering status of the U.S. Fed itself, and a U.S. economy that is vastly larger than any other.

In a stunning announcement this month, Bernanke said the U.S. Fed will keep borrowing rates close to zero at least until mid-2015, to stimulate consumer and business spending. And it will purchase an anticipated $143 billion in mortgage bonds this year alone. But the shocker was that the Fed will keep up those purchases, putting money in Main Street pockets, well beyond years’ end if necessary — indeed, until the U.S. economy has fully recovered.

In a speech last week, Charles Evans, who heads the Federal Reserve Board of Chicago, explained that “Stating that we expect to keep a highly [stimulative] stance for policy for a considerable time after the recovery strengthens is an important reassurance to households and businesses.”

That might be an understatement. U.S. business and consumer spending has finally begun to show signs of renewed life, thanks mostly to a vigorous Fed. By contrast, there has been a near-total absence of restorative action elsewhere in Washington. Republicans on Capitol Hill with a stated goal of making Barack Obama a failed, one-term president have repeatedly rejected Obama’s calls an encore to his highly successful stimulus of 2009-10.

If political leaders in Berlin, Helsinki, London and Washington are going to cling to obsolete, ideologically-driven claptrap about the inflationary impact of stimulus (it’s the far more chaotic prospect of deflation that should worry us), then central bankers really have no choice but to take control of the commanding heights of the economy.

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Historians, especially of the armchair variety, are inclined to assign credit or blame for periods of economic strength or despond to heads of government. Wilfrid Laurier and his “sunny ways” may have merely coincided with Canada’s first sustained period of prosperity, but his legacy is that of a PM whose policies helped bring about Canada’s economic coming of age.

In future, we will know better, ascribing good times to the likes of Mark Carney and his consistently-able predecessors. And to Bernanke, father of a new and smarter approach to economic management, and a fellow of no small courage in bringing it about.

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