In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last 2/3 of the 20th century absent the Great Depression but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: WWII and II and the Cold War. We argue that without the Depression the...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

In this chapter, I compare the economic performance on the gold standard to that under central banking based on the growth and stability of prices and real production. I find that the Fed has not obviously outperformed the market-based gold standard. The price level was more predictable prior to...

I consider whether a rules-based fiat money system can outperform the gold standard in delivering economic stability. I discuss the potential objectives of monetary policy in Section 1 and the means for achieving the objective in Section 2. I turn to questions of political economy in Section 3....

A key question about the Great Depression is whether expansionary monetary policy in the United States would have led to a loss of confidence in the U. S. commitment to the gold standard. This paper uses the $1 billion expansionary open market operation undertaken in the spring of 1932 as a...

Part II begins with a case study from Switzerland by Tomas Casas i Klett (China Competence Center, FIM-HSG University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) and Omar Serrano Oswald (University of Geneva, Switzerland) that shows how FTAs are used by the BRI as stepping-stones for multilateralism. They...

This paper explores the composition of international reserves under a central bank’s exchange rate policy target. The model allows for numerical estimation of the shadow price – interpreted as the central bank’s sacrifice of policy precision given additional unit of portfolio variance or...

World War I dramatically altered the world's financial landscape. Most countries left the gold standard, and New York replaced London as the major lender in world capital markets. This paper discusses how the gold exchange standard was reconstructed in the 1920s. We show that the U.S. capital...