scholarly journals Le système monétaire européen à la lumière de l’expérience et de la théorie monétaires

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Dehem

In the light of monetary experience and theory, the EMS appears to be unsustainable. Monetary history of the past sixty years shows that every attempt to stabilise the international monetary System has been frustrated as a consequence of divergent egocentric monetary policies. The breakdown of the rules of the gold standard game in the twenties, as well as the use of money as an instrument in national macroeconomic policies under the Bretton Woods regime have ultimately led to the demise of the fixed exchange rates System. In the sixties, European views on monetary policies were quite divergent, but in the seventies institutional attempts were made to bring them apparently into line. The "snake" arrangements, initiated in 1972, soon degenerated. The more ambitious attempt of 1979, the institutionally more elaborate EMS, suffers from the same basic weakness as all the previous ones. It lacks a common monetary standard, such as the one proposed in the 1975 Ail-Saints Manifesto. Such a standard is a necessary and a sufficient condition for a sustainable common monetary System.

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (4I) ◽  
pp. 425-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Laidler

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was much support among academic economists for abandoning the Bretton Woods System in favour of a system of flexible exchange rates. Such proposals had their opponents, of course, some of whom, for example Robert Triffin (l960), believed that, if anything. the Bretton Woods System granted too much, rather than too little, scope to individual national governments to vary their exchange rates. Nevertheless, at that time, the weight of professional opinion was against them, and when exchange rate flexibility was adopted in the 1970s, economists by and large welcomed it. This change in policy regime was not, however, the outcome of reforms undertaken in the light of academic arguments; although these did have some influence in some places, not least the United Kingdom.' Nevertheless, the single most important factor leading to the demise of the Bretton Woods System was not the acceptance of any academic arguments about how to make the international monetary system function more’ smoothly. It was something much more down to earth, namely the unwillingness of certain governments, notably that of West Germany, to accept the balance of payments and hence domestic inflationary consequences of United States fiscal and monetary policies associated with the Vietnam War.


Author(s):  
José Antonio Ocampo

The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which created the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was a major landmark in international cooperation. However, the Bretton Woods system came under increasing pressure in the 1960s due to the lack of a reliable adjustment mechanism to manage payment imbalances as well as the persistent asymmetries in the balance-of-payments pressures faced by surplus and deficit countries. In 1971 the system effectively collapsed when the US government suspended convertibility of dollars into gold for other central banks—a decision that would prove to be permanent. The system that evolved to replace it can be viewed as a ‘non-system’ with diverse ad hoc arrangements. Viewed overall this non-system has proved to be fairly resilient, but some of its major gaps continue to have negative effects on the global economy.


Author(s):  
Harold James

Why do central banks attempt to cooperate with other central banks? Why should those political systems (in practice, in the advanced modern industrial world, democratic states), to whom ultimately the central banks are accountable, accept a cooperative strategy of the central banks? What overall gain do they expect to achieve? The answers clearly depend on the definition of the fundamental tasks of central banks, and thus on how cooperation might be envisaged as a tool in the accomplishment of those goals. The purposes and functions of central banks, however, have changed dramatically over the course of time, in accordance with the changing international monetary system from the gold standard, through the Bretton Woods system to the post-1973 order, including European monetary integration. This chapter reviews the pattern, motivation, and record of central bank cooperation in the broader international context of debate about macroeconomic cooperation from the nineteenth century onwards.


Policy Papers ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (25) ◽  
Author(s):  

The modern history of the international monetary system (IMS) starts with the shift from a bimetallic system to the Gold Standard in the 1870s and 1880s. Under the Gold Standard, the major national currencies were freely convertible to gold at a fixed exchange rate, with adjustment largely undertaken through flexible prices, wages and income. This system survived up to the outbreak of the First World War, and while it was subsequently re-established in a modified form following a painful period of post-war disinflation, the economic and political strains of the Great Depression led to the system’s ultimate collapse in the 1930s. Negotiations between the U.K. and U.S. in the 1940s led to the post war emergence of the Bretton Woods system of fixed and adjustable exchange rates tied to the dollar, with the dollar fixed to gold and the IMF established to oversee the system. However, this system too faced repeated strains, and with the dollar’s link to gold broken and most major currencies floating in the early 1970s, the current arrangements centered on floating currencies were born. The U.S. dollar remained the key reserve currency in the new system, with U.S. Treasury Bills the major reserve asset.


Author(s):  
Артур Анатолійович Василенко

UDC 336.74   Vasylenko Artur, post-graduate student. Mariupol State University. Cryptocurrency Phenomenon in the International Monetary System. The main prerequisites of cryptocurrency emergence in the international monetary system in terms of regionalization of the world economy are defined in the article. Determination of «cryptocurrency» category was analysed from the point of two main approaches to its treatment: on the one hand cryptocurrency is admitted to be the currency equally to the sovereign currency, and on the other hand it is considered as an unrecognized virtual asset. The main consequences which arise in case of widespread use of crypto currency for the country and for the parties that agreed to use cryptocurrency were analysed and systematized. On the basis of the research, given the current trends in the world economy, the author put forward and substantiated the hypothesis to classify the phenomenon of cryptocurrency as the effects of a famous philosophical «Negation of negation law» formulated by G. Hegel at the beginning of the XIX century.   Keywords: cryptocurrency, material money, electronic money, digital currency, regional currency integration, blockchain, mining, capitalization, «Negation of negation law».


1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Nadeem A. Burney

Its been long recognized that various economies of the world are interlinked through international trade. The experience of the past several years, however, has demonstrated that this economic interdependence is far greater than was previously realized. In this context, the importance of international economic theory as an area distinct from general economics hardly needs any mentioning. What gives international economic theory this distinction is international markets for some goods and effects of national sovereignty on the character of economic activity. Wilfred Ethier's book, which incorporates recent developments in the field, is an excellent addition to textbooks on international economics for one- or twosemester undergraduate courses. The book mostly covers standard topics. A distinguishing feature of this book is its detailed analysis of the flexible exchange rates and a discussion of the various approaches used for their determination. Within each chapter, the author has extensively used facts, figures and major events to clarify the concepts in the light of the theoretical framework. The book also discusses, in a fair amount of detail, the existing international monetary system and the role of various international organizations.


Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Farhi ◽  
Matteo Maggiori

AbstractWe propose a simple model of the international monetary system. We study the world supply and demand for reserve assets denominated in different currencies under a variety of scenarios: a hegemon versus a multipolar world; abundant versus scarce reserve assets; and a gold exchange standard versus a floating rate system. We rationalize the Triffin dilemma, which posits the fundamental instability of the system, as well as the common prediction regarding the natural and beneficial emergence of a multipolar world, the Nurkse warning that a multipolar world is more unstable than a hegemon world, and the Keynesian argument that a scarcity of reserve assets under a gold standard or at the zero lower bound is recessionary. Our analysis is both positive and normative.


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