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Reviving confidence
Abstract
This paper examines two competing proposals for reforming and reviving confidence in the world monetary system, and the two economists, Robert Triffin and Fritz Machlup, who led the charge, one for centralized reserves, and the other for flexible exchange rates. Triffin would later claim that no one did more to ensure that floating exchange rates emerged the winner in the policy debate than Machlup because of his influence on academic economists and policy makers through the Bellagio Group conferences. The Bellagio Group conferences and Machlup’s leadership role are examined.
In the 1950s Pierre Uri played a significant role in shaping the European eco-nomic order. Thanks to his prominent contributions to the team of advisers that centred around Jean Monnet, both the ECSC and the EEC Treaties were designed to encompass the potential to evolve into a federal constitution for Europe. The paper aims to highlight the role of Pierre Uri in drafting the main features of the institutional, decision-making, and fiscal architecture of early European economic integration.
We reinterpret the commonly held view in the U.S. that France, by following a policy from 1965 to 1968 of deliberately converting their dollar holdings into gold helped perpetuate the collapse of the Bretton Woods International Monetary System. We argue that French international monetary policy under Charles de Gaulle was consistent with strategies developed in the interwar period and the French Plan of 1943. France used proposals to return to an orthodox gold standard as well as conversions of its dollar reserves into gold as tactical threats to induce the United States to initiate the reform of the international monetary system towards a more symmetrical and co-operative gold-exchange standard regime.
My first publications were in this field and I am still cultivating it, 55 years later. My first book was on the gold-exchange standard. This book had developed from a seminar paper, done in 1922, and from my doctoral dissertation, completed in 1923. It was published in 1924, with the imprint 1925. Perhaps a brief description of Europe at that time can show how the book fitted in its time.
Evidence suggests there is a strong tendency among states to choose fixed exchange rates. Yet the interpretation of fixed exchange rates as a monetary policy rule remains unconvincing. Adopting an endogenous policy perspective, this paper argues that political-support-maximizing governments choose fixed exchange rates to benefit domestic interest groups. Exogenous shocks, however, may change domestic political equilibria, causing the collapse of international arrangements and the switch to flexible exchange rates. Institutional peculiarities make monetary unification a special case in this cycle.
Fourteen leading economists analyze the problem of imbalance in international payments and suggest corrective measures. Three general appraisals by William Fellner, Fritz Machlup, and Robert Triffin are followed by shorter technical papers on special issues by Fellner, Gottfried Haberler, Sir Roy Harrod, Harry G. Johnson, Peter B. Kenen, Alexandre Lamfalussy, Friedrich A. Lutz, Machlup, Jürg Niehans, Walters S. Salant, Tibor Scitovsky, James Tobin, Triffin, and Robert L. West.
From Rice Vaughan, 1675: “The first Invention of Money was for a Pledge and instead of a Surety” to John Maynard Keynes, 1937: “Our desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust” there is a tradition of monetary theory linking the demand for money with the state of confidence. In the early nineteenth century, Henry Thornton and Thomas Attwood analyzed the shifts in precautionary demand for money and their implications for money supply, production, employment, and the balance of payments. The tradition was interrupted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was subsequently revived by Keynes's General Theory.
Members of the European Union (EU) have long attempted to unify their monetary policies, whether by fixing exchange rates or moving toward a single currency. The success of these attempts has varied over time, and among EU member states. This article argues that the degree to which a country is integrated into EU trade and finance has a major impact on its willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to pursue monetary integration, especially stability against Europe's anchor currency, the Deutsche Mark (DM). Higher levels of intra-European trade and investment increase the desirability of stabilizing exchange rates between European countries. Statistical evidence indicates that greater integration of goods and capital markets is associated with greater success in fixing national exchange rates against the DM. This implies that pressures for monetary integration will continue but will vary among countries, along with the degree to which they are economically linked to European trade and investment.
Structuralist explanations have dominated attempts to explain the process of European integration. However, as the negotiation of Economic and Monetary Union shows, policy leadership has been critical in launching, shaping, and sustaining this process. This leadership goes beyond policy entrepreneurship in setting the agenda to include the management of institutional venues in the pursuit of particular objectives.
The Franco–German relationship emerges as a key venue that defines the scope and limitations of policy leadership and that was crucial in binding in the Bundesbank and EU central bankers to the process. At the domestic level, the political drive from Kohl and Mitterrand was decisive. Delors was a key driving force, at certain stages, both within the European Commission and as chair of the Delors Committee. Together, they acted as animateurs and ingénieurs of Economic and Monetary Union. The strategic aspect of leadership in the cases of Britain and Italy was altogether different. The Thatcher and Major governments repeatedly misjudged the commitment of their partners to proceed, and the inflexibility of their positions prevented them from building countervailing coalitions. For Italy, EMU was a test of external credibility: domestic weakness limited her overall influence on the progress of the initiative, whilst EMU was seized upon by a small leadership group as a new vincolo esterno (external constraint) to secure otherwise difficult domestic reforms. This latter strategy was replicated more widely as member states endeavored to meet the entry criteria for participation in the single currency.
The outcome of the Maastricht Treaty was an imperfect agreement that generates serious future challenges for policy leadership. These challenges include cognitive gaps in EMU, institutional innovation, and imperfect legitimation.
Beginning in 1999, US policymakers suddenly began to debate the idea of encouraging Latin American countries to adopt the US dollar as their domestic currency. In this article, I show that the US debate concerning the pros and cons of ‘dollarization diplomacy’ has two interesting historical precedents that help us understand the politics of US policymaking in this area. The first took place between 1900 and 1915 when the US also showed considerable interest in the idea of promoting the use of dollar within many Latin American countries. Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, US policymakers did an about-face and encouraged those same countries to ‘de-dollarize’. To date, these dramatic changes in this aspect of US-Latin American monetary relations in the twentieth century have received very little scholarly attention. But I argue that a study of them is useful in identifying what influences US foreign economic policy towards dollarization abroad today. I show how US policy, both in the past and present, has been influenced by: prevalent macroeconomic ideologies, domestic economic interests, and geopolitical concerns.
From Rice Vaughan, 1675: “The first Invention of Money was for a Pledge and instead of a Surety” to John Maynard Keynes, 1937: “Our desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust” there is a tradition of monetary theory linking the demand for money with the state of confidence. In the early nineteenth century, Henry Thornton and Thomas Attwood analyzed the shifts in precautionary demand for money and their implications for money supply, production, employment, and the balance of payments. The tradition was interrupted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was subsequently revived by Keynes's General Theory.
In this paper we analyze the changing role of gold in the international monetary system, in particular the persistence of gold holdings by monetary authorities for 20 years following the breakdown of the Brettone Woods system system and the Second Amendment to the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund which severed the formal link to gold. We stress four points. First, the gold-exchange standard was a recent arrangement that emerged only around 1900 in response to a set of historically-specific factors which also help to account for it smooth operation. How long those factors would have continued to support it will never be known, due to a great war and then a great depression. Second, a system which relied on inelastically supplied precious metal and elastcially suppled foreign exchange to meet the the world economy's demand for reserves was intrinsically fragile, prone to confidence problems, and a transmission belt for policy mistakes. Third, network externalities, statutory restrictions and habit all contributed to the persistence of the practice of holding gold reserves. But the hold of even factors as powerful as these inevitably weakens with time and the effects of their erosion are reinforced by the rise of international capital mobility, which increases the ease of holding other forms of reserves, both unborrowed and borrowed, and by the shift to greater exchange-rate flexibility, which according to our results diminishes the demand for reserves in general. Fourth and finally, network externalities, in conjunction with central bankers' collective sense of responsibility for the stability of the price of what remains an important reserve asset, suggest that the same factors which have long held in place the practice of holding gold reserves, when they come unstuck, may become unstuck all at once.
This paper discusses macroeconomic and monetary policy-making at the European Commission, covering the period from the Rome Treaties to the Hague Summit. It is based on an analysis of public documents, archival research and interviews with former policy-makers. The paper starts with an overview of the economic philosophy of the Rome Treaties and senior macroeconomic policy-makers at the Commission, followed by an analysis of economic developments in the 1960s. Thereafter, the focus is on three crucial macroeconomic policy documents of the period: the European Reserve Fund project in 1958, the Commission's Action Programme for the Second Stage of the EEC of October 1962 and the Barre Memorandum of October 1969. The Commission\u2019s objectives tended to be both defensive, preserving the "acquis communautaire", especially avoiding recourse to the safeguard clauses, and pro-active, stimulating the process of European integration. From an analytical point of view, the Commission focussed on the compatibility of policies between the Member States. Gradually, a typical Commission analysis developed, based on a blending of German convergence ideas with the French medium-term approach. The paper further illustrates the ascent of the Commission as an actor in the monetary area, notwithstanding the relatively limited provisions of the EEC Treaty.
After a quarter of a century of floating among the major currencies, exchange rate policy is still source of vexation, and the appropriate choice is by no means clear. Should a country allow its currency to float, subject perhaps to exchange market interventionl from time to time? Or should it fis its currency to some other currency or currencies, and if so to which one(s)? This paper will suggest that the responses that have been given by many economists over the past few decades are ineadequate and possibly quite poor advice to decision-makers.
Hearings before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 86th Congress, First Session, Part 9A
- Triffin Robert
Fritz Machlup and Marginalism
- Langlois