In 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In that work, he anticipated the collapse of the first era of globalization that began in the mid-nineteenth century. He admonished the short-sighted assumption that these years of relative peace and...

The COVID-19 pandemic spawned a global liquidity crisis in March 2020. The global liquidity crisis was alleviated by the Federal Reserve and other advanced country central banks cooperating by extending the swap lines they developed in the Global Financial Crisis 2007-2008. Central bank...

In this paper we reconsider the international market integration, starting at high levels in the late nineteenth century, collapsing between the wars, and recovering gradually after 1945 to reach levels comparable to pre-1914 in the 1990's. The empirical evidence we survey suggests that in some...

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...

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...

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...

This paper presents an overview of the Bretton Woods experience. From an historical perspective. I analyze its performance relative to other international monetary regimes. its origins. its operation. its problems and its demise. In the survey I emphasize both issues deemed important at the time...

As it turned out, after 1965 the key problem facing the global economy was inflation, not deflation, reflecting expansionary Federal Reserve policies to finance the Vietnam war and the Great Inflation. US inflation was exported through the balance of payments to the surplus countries of Europe...

In this paper we examine the transition from spontaneous order circa 1850 to designed system and then back towards spontaneous order in the late twentieth century, arguing that it is an evolution with multiple stops and starts, and that the threads that underlie the general tendency through...