The Benefits of Commitment to a Currency Peg: Aggregate Lessons from the Regional Effects of the 1896 U.S. Presidential Election

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Fulford ◽  
Felipe Schwartzman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Factor Model ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Real Activity ◽  
Regional Effects ◽  
The One ◽  
Positive Shock

We develop a method to use the one-time cross-sectional impact of a cleanly identified shock to identify its aggregate impact through the use of a factor model. We apply this methodology to evaluate the importance of fluctuations to the commitment to a currency peg for macroeconomic outcomes during the gold standard period in the United States. The presidential election in 1896 provides a cleanly identified positive shock to commitment to the gold standard. After the election, bank leverage increased substantially, particularly in states where gold was in greater use. Using the latent factor identified by the election, we find that full commitment to gold had the potential to reduce the volatility of real activity overall by a significant amount in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as well as substantially mitigate the economic depression starting in 1893.

The United States: Silver Threats among the Gold, 1880–96

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffry A. Frieden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Exchange Rate Policy ◽  
World Markets ◽  
Rate Policy ◽  
Currency Policy ◽  
Almost All

This chapter surveys US currency policy in the 1890s. The United States was on the gold standard from 1879 until 1933. For almost all that time, US currency policy was politically controversial. The controversy became particularly heated during periods of economic distress, especially in the 1890s. In what is perhaps the most famous modern political conflict over exchange rate policy, the Populist movement launched a concerted attack on the gold standard, which led up to a presidential election fought largely over gold. The rise of the Populist movement came at a pivotal time as the country had matured industrially while remaining predominantly agrarian. The battle of the standards was also a fight over whose vision of society would dominate: the big cities with their booming finance, commerce, and industries, or the countryside with its thriving cotton, tobacco, and wheat farms whose products dominated world markets.

Core Europe and the United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-150
Author(s):  
Mitchell A. Orenstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Extremism ◽  
The Us ◽  
The One ◽  
Democratic Elections

Core Europe and North America have often imagined themselves to be invulnerable to the Russian influence campaigns that have affected smaller, weaker countries in the lands in between. However, in recent years, that perception has broken down as Russia regularly hacks democratic elections in the West, sponsors extremists, spreads disinformation, and may have tipped the US 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. The West now exhibits a similar politics to what we observe in the lands in between—with growing political extremism and polarization on the one hand and the rise of cynical power brokers on the other who seek to profit from both sides of an intensifying divide. Increasingly, democratic elections seem to pose a “civilizational choice” between the forces of liberal democracy and authoritarian nationalism on the Russian model.

Newsletter

2001 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alleen Pace Nilsen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bright Spot ◽  
Presidential Candidate ◽  
The One

AbstractEven before the complications of counting hanging chads, dimples, and pregnants on the Florida ballots, the United States' 2000 Presidential election was chalked up as a situation in which people were laughing more at the candidates than with them. The one bright spot was Joseph I. Lieberman, who “became the first vice-presidential candidate in American history to begin his convention speech with a mother-in-law joke.” After he was introduced by his wife, Hadassah, he said.

scholarly journals European Union ‒ USA: On the Way to a “New Normality”

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Alexander Shumilin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transatlantic Relations ◽  
White House ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nord Stream ◽  
The One ◽  
The Eu

The article analyzes the state of relations between transatlantic partners in the context of the presidential campaign in the United States, and also attempts to predict their development after November 2020.The presidency of D. Trump thoroughly shook the foundations of Euro-Atlantic solidarity. This applies to the parties' adherence to democratic values (Trump does not hide his sympathy for European leaders with a penchant for authoritarianism), and also applies to the interaction of the US and the EU in the trade, economic and military fields. While most European elites prefer the Democratic candidate Biden to win the presidential election, many analysts believe that his probable arrival in the White House will hardly change much. Transatlantic relations have already entered a stage of serious transformation. We can witness the emergence of a “new normal” in transatlantic relations, accepted by Brussels on the one hand and, apparently, by Biden's team, on the other. It is designed to reduce the previous scale of the EU's dependence on the United States in the field of defense, while fixing issues in relation where the approaches of the allies may not completely coincide or even differ significantly (a striking example is the fate of the “Nord Stream 2”). If implemented, this model of relations may prevent the emergence of new lines of tension between allies in the transatlantic partnership.

Magic and Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Sabina Magliocco
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Spirit World

This essay introduces a special issue of Nova Religio on magic and politics in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The articles in this issue address a gap in the literature examining intersections of religion, magic, and politics in contemporary North America. They approach political magic as an essentially religious phenomenon, in that it deals with the spirit world and attempts to motivate human behavior through the use of symbols. Covering a range of practices from the far right to the far left, the articles argue against prevailing scholarly treatments of the use of esoteric technologies as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, showing how they have also been operationalized by the left in recent history. They showcase the creativity of magic as a form of human cultural expression, and demonstrate how magic coexists with rationality in contemporary western settings.

Looking for Something to Signify

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The One

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.

Can India Balance China in Asia?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
The One

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.

Raanan Rein, Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina, trans. Marsha Grenzeback. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 166 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

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