This book contains a collection of Michael D. Bordo's essays written singly and with colleagues on the classical gold standard and related regimes based directly or indirectly on gold convertibility. The gold standard (and its variants) was the basis for both international and domestic monetary arrangements from the third quarter of the nineteenth century until 1971 when President Nixon closed the US gold window, effectively ending the Bretton Woods International Monetary System. Although the gold standard and its variants are now history, it still has great appeal for policymakers and...

This is the first full-length study of five U.S. banking panics of the Great Depression. Professor Wicker reconstructs a close historical narrative of each of the disturbances, investigating their origins, magnitude and effects, and he reappraises the role of Federal Reserve officials in the panics. His findings challenge many of the commonly-held assumptions about the events of 1930 and 1931, and will be of wide interest to students of the Great Depression, monetary and financial historians, financial and macroeconomists.

Based on a wide array of data collected by the author, this book uses clear theoretically motivated economic analysis to explain the structure, performance, and influence of universal banks and securities markets on firms during industrialisation. The German universal banks played a significant but not overwhelming role in the ownership and control of corporate firms. Banks gained access to boards via a confluence of their underwriting and brokerage activities, the legal phenomena of bearer shares and deposited voting rights, and the flourishing securities markets of the turn of the twentieth...

No longer just a relic of the Great Depression, deflation has been established in China and Japan since the 1990s and currently threatens other major economies such as Germany and even the United States. This volume considers why deflation may be worse than inflation and explores how individuals and policymakers have responded to the phenomenon. Monetary and exchange rate regimes as well as stock market reactions play an important part in advancing, or slowing, deflationary trends. The book's coverage ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve details the evolution of the monetary standard from the start of the Federal Reserve through the end of the Greenspan era. The book places that evolution in the context of the intellectual and political environment of the time. By understanding the fitful process of replacing a gold standard with a paper money standard, the conduct of monetary policy becomes a series of experiments useful for understanding the fundamental issues concerning money and prices. How did the recurrent monetary instability of the 20th century relate to the economic...

This volume deals with the monetary history of Italy from independence in 1861 to 1992. It provides the first complete analysis of a country that has experienced diverse and often dramatic monetary conditions. The book contributes in a novel way not only to the monetary debate, but also to fiscal and institutional questions. The authors combine economic theory, statistical data, and history in an accessible way that should prove useful to both economic historians and monetary economists.

Many economists view competition among central banks as leading to an over-issue of money. This book challenges the conventional wisdom by showing that competition among Federal Reserve banks in the 1920s did not result in an over-issue problem. The US Congress imposed a more monopolistic structure on the Fed in the mid-1930s so that it could accomodate an increase in the revenue needs of the Treasury. This book is unique in emphasizing the evolution of the Fed's structure from a highly competitive one to a highly monopolistic one.

This book examines the insights that Keynesian macroeconomics offers into the economic history of the prewar British economy. It adopts a modern economic approach to issues such as unemployment, the price level and exchange rates in the period 1870-1939, making use of the latest advances in time series analysis and macroeconomics. In addition to being of interest to economic historians, it is relevant to economists concerned with current policy issues, since it shows how far correct policy choices depend on particular historical circumstances. This book examines the insights that Keynesian...

No longer just a relic of the Great Depression, deflation has been established in China and Japan since the 1990s and currently threatens other major economies such as Germany and even the United States. This volume considers why deflation may be worse than inflation and explores how individuals and policymakers have responded to the phenomenon. Monetary and exchange rate regimes as well as stock market reactions play an important part in advancing, or slowing, deflationary trends. The book's coverage ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

This book sets the record straight on why the Federal Reserve failed to rescue Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis.