Robert Triffin became famous with his trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the Bretton Woods system. These are still at the center of many discussions today. This paper argues that there is a remarkable continuity in Triffin's work. From his earliest writings, Triffin developed a vision...

This paper addresses the enduring insistence on the moral dimension of international economic relations in Keynes’s economics and diplomacy. The issue has so far raised scarce attention in the literature, which tend to attribute some outstanding failures of Keynes’s economic diplomacy to the...

Dissatisfied with both Skidelsky's "Fighting for Britain" approach to Keynes's quest for a new global order and its specular competitor, the "Figthing despite Britain" view, we explore the possibility of a "Fighting through Britain" approach to the issue. We claim that though Keynes was fighting...

In the attempt to deepen the understanding of Keynes's thought as an international macroeconomist, we explore the hypothesis of consistency between his general methodological approach to the economic material and his way of reasoning about international economic relations as shaped by WWI. We...

The paper retraces the history of the debate on the Washington Consensus according to the four-stage partition Consensus, Confusion, Contention, Conclusion, with particular attention to the criticisms evoked by the use of it as a tool for the "integrationist agenda" of the Nineties. We argue...

The most notable idea of Charles P. Kindleberger’s later career is the value of a single country acting as stabilizer of an international economy prone to instability. It runs through his widely read books, "The World in Depression, 1929-1939" (1973), "Manias, Crises, and Panics" (1978), "A...

The article is part of the special issue of the journal on Charles P. Kindleberger (CPK). By reviewing CPK's works the authors investigates the contributions by Kindleberger not mainly as a historian but as an economist. Kindleberger's theory of financial crises is reconstructed, drawing from...

1. CRUSHED FLOWER Form my personal associations, I found that Shrimathi Indira Gandhi had a special affinity to the Rose, particularly the dark-pink variety. This, probably she inherited from her father, late Shri. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Freedom Fighter, one of the founders of the Indian National...

In a recent edition of Economic Affairs, Edwin van de Haar provides evidence against the thesis that trade fosters peace. However, I argue his description of the “trade-fosters-peace” thesis as insufficiently precise is incorrect. By its nature, we must use probabilistic language....

Robert Triffin (1911-1993) was one of the main protagonists in the international monetary debates in the postwar period. He became famous with his book Gold and the Dollar Crisis, published in 1960, in which he predicted the end of the Bretton Woods system. In his analysis there, Triffin was...