The primary focus of this year’s Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which convenes the world’s leading central bankers, was not explicitly monetary policy.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate novelist most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, was native to Colombia. Nonetheless, as a master of magical realism, Garcia Marquez would have appreciated Argentina’s recent combination of fact and fantasy.

Until the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, deflation had all but disappeared as a concern for policymakers and investors in the advanced economies, apart from Japan, which has been subject to persistent downward pressure on prices for nearly a generation.

Only a small group of central banks refrain from intervening in the foreign exchange market to stabilize their currencies’ exchange rate or coax it in the desired direction.

Italy’s referendum on Dec. 4 will give voters the opportunity to approve or reject what some have described as the country’s most extensive constitutional reforms since the abolition of the monarchy at the end of World War II.

The United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum has shaken equity and financial markets around the world. As in prior episodes of contagious financial turmoil, the victory of the “Leave” vote sent skittish global investors toward the usual safe havens.

Between 1913 (when the United States Federal Reserve was founded) and the latter part of the 1980s, it would be fair to say that the Fed was the only game in town when it came to purchases of US Treasury securities by central banks.