It is believed that central banks are independent from the government. However, their own history shows that they emerged to serve the government’s “needs” and then seized control of money production for those same needs. Since the state mandates that we pay taxes and set prices exclusively in “its” monetary units, the central bank—which issues these units and oversees the entire banking system—is by definition folded into the state’s “needs.”
Between central banks and governments (in the technical sense), short-term divergences and contradictions may arise, but they are usually resolved in favor of the government.
Even the Bundesbank, held up as the model implementation of an independent central bank, turned out, in the end, to be a bad one, succumbing to pressure from the Chancellor during the conversion of the East German mark to the West German mark. Right now, the European Central Bank is once again acknowledging its complete helplessness, and the mutual understanding between Obama and Bernanke is also widely known. In fact, everything one needs to know about a central bank is encapsulated in Alan Greenspan’s phrase that “the Fed works almost as well as the gold standard.”