Under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to...

A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960 published in 1963 was written as part of an extensive NBER research project on Money and Business Cycles started in the 1950s. The project resulted in three more books and many important articles. A Monetary History was designed to provide...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between loose monetary policy, low inflation, and easy bank credit with house price booms. Using a panel of 11 OECD countries from 1920 to 2011 we estimate a panel VAR in order to identify shocks that can be interpreted as loose monetary policy...

An analogy has been made between the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the recent Eurozone crisis. The build up of TARGET balances in the Eurosystem of Central Banks after 2007 with the GIPS (deficit countries having large liabilities) and Germany (a surplus country) with large...

The international gold standard of the late nineteenth century has been described as a system of 'spontaneous order', capturing the idea that its architects at the time were fashioning domestic monetary systems which created a system of fixed exchange rates almost as a by-product. In contrast...

There are some striking similarities between the pre 1914 gold standard and EMU today. Both arrangements are based on fixed exchange rates, monetary and fiscal orthodoxy. Each regime gave easy access by financially underdeveloped peripheral countries to capital from the core countries. But the...

Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt conflict with its monetary policy. With the on-set of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for...

The case for monetary simplification and unification has been made since the middle of the nineteenth century. It rests on four principal arguments ;reduced transaction costs; establishing credibility; preventing bad policy in other states; political integration via money. In this paper we argue...

In this paper we provide evidence using annual data for the period 1880 to 1986 that institutional variables are significant determinants of velocity in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and Norway. This evidence supplements our earlier findings (Bordo and Jonung, Cambridge...

This paper discusses the role for a lender of last resort (LLR) in preventing banking panics (section I) , then briefly considers classical and more recent concepts of the LLR (section II). Section III examines historical evidence for the U.S. and other countries on the incidence of banking...