Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The inter-war gold standard, along with most other aspects of economic experience for that period, has a relatively bad name in the literature. In part, this bad name has been a product of the myth-making about the ‘bad old days’ which accompanied the birth of such post-1930s institutions as the International Monetary Fund. In part, inter-war gold standard experience acquired its reputation through a process of guilt by association which suggested that it must have played a significant role in the economic difficulties of the period, most notably in the years after 1928–9. This guilt-by-association view of the standard is perhaps strongest in Great Britain, where references to the return to gold in 1925 or subsequent, related events recur in articles or letters in the press to this day.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the construction, operation and disintegration of the inter-war gold standard system. In doing so, I shall pay particular attention to the interrelationships between the system as a whole and its constituent countries. The focus throughout will be predominantly European, but events in overseas economies will enter the story where appropriate and, of course, the United States remains omnipresent.
The war
The inter-war gold standard had its origins in the effects of the First World War on the pre-war gold standard regime. Although ‘no simple statement with respect to the breakdown of the gold standard during the war can be true’, it is clear that in most countries the forms of the prewar system were sufficiently altered that significant changes in the bases of the old system were possible.
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