Chapter 7 takes an Olsonian perspective. We ask the question of what drove central bank balance sheet policies in democracies. This development is understood from the perspective of Mancur Olson’s ground-breaking theory of the ‘rise and decline of nations’ which accounts for the increasing difficulty to reform as distributional coalitions impose the ‘slavery of the rent-seeking society’ (as the former chief economist of the GATT, Jan Tumlir, so appropriately put it) on democratic societies. In light of these considerations, the factual degree of central bank independence might lower than it appears at first glance.