Taming the Cycles of Finance? Central Banks and the Macro-Prudential Shift in Financial Regulation. By Matthias Thiemann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 300p. £95.00 cloth.

Taming the Cycles of Finance? is a book about central banks that isn't about central bank independence.Instead, author Matthias Thiemann offers a detailed account of the macroprudential turn in financial regulation that emerged in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC).The core question that the book asks and answers is: why have central banks adopted some macroprudential policy approaches and not others?Thiemann considers potential explanatory variation across policy type, time, and place.He distinguishes between policies that seek to bolster the resilience of the financial system and those which aim to "tame" financial cycles.He examines the regulatory reaction to the GFC as well as more recent shifts related to the pandemic.Finally, he does all this in the USA, the UK, and the Eurozone.To guide his inquiry Thiemann adopts Peter Hall's classic conceptual architecture for understanding policy change which suggests new policies must be politically, administratively, and economically viable.