Over the next two weeks, its officials Federal Reserve and her European Central Bank they will decide how much more they need to raise the cost of money to restore price stability, while trying not to topple their economies and push the already creaking banking system into crisis.

As the world’s major central banks near the end of their steepest rate hike campaign in decades, hard lessons from past mistakes will weigh heavily on decisions about when and where borrowing costs will peak.

Already, the credibility of central banks has been damaged by their belated reaction to the spike in inflation. This is why even now central bankers want to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors.

For the Fed chairman, Jerome Powellthat means avoiding the “stop-go” monetary policy pursued by the Federal Reserve in the 1970s, sometimes fighting high unemployment and sometimes high inflation.

ECB President Christine Lagarde will not want to repeat the policy U-turns made when inflationary pressures were misinterpreted in 2008 and 2011.

While central banks will push interest rates higher, how long they will keep them at these levels is a question even central bank officials struggle to answer. As Bloomberg notes, no one knows how long it will take to curb stubborn inflation in services, or how quickly the credit squeeze will hit demand.

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