A Tract on Monetary Reform is a book by John Maynard Keynes, published in 1923. [1] Keynes presented an argument in favour of a policy that would try to stabilize the domestic price level. He argued that the Bank of England had the policy tools available to provide a semblance of price stability through its stance on interest rates and its capacity to manage the reserves of the banking sector. Keynes believed that domestic price stability was accompanied by exchange rate flexibility. After years of experience, he did not favour floating exchange rates and proposed what is today called a crawling peg. [2]
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. It is influenced by a host of factors that sometimes behave erratically and impact production, employment, and inflation.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes national, regional, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the early 1920s, and from the late 1920s to 1932 as well as from 1944 until 1971 when the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system. Many states nonetheless hold substantial gold reserves.
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, was an English economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics. He is known as the "father of macroeconomics".
The Bretton Woods Conference, formally known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was the gathering of 730 delegates from all 44 allied nations at the Mount Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, to regulate what would be the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of World War II.
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia and other countries, a total of 44 countries after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold. It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.
A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which, "after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers holding cash rather than holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest."
The quantity theory of money is a hypothesis within monetary economics which states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, and that the causality runs from money to prices. This implies that the theory potentially explains inflation. It originated in the 16th century and has been proclaimed the oldest surviving theory in economics.
Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell was a Swedish economist of the Stockholm school. He was professor at Uppsala University and Lund University.
In macroeconomics, inflation targeting is a monetary policy where a central bank follows an explicit target for the inflation rate for the medium-term and announces this inflation target to the public. The assumption is that the best that monetary policy can do to support long-term growth of the economy is to maintain price stability, and price stability is achieved by controlling inflation. The central bank uses interest rates as its main short-term monetary instrument.
The Triffin dilemma is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. This dilemma was identified in the 1960s by Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin, who noted how the country whose currency is the global reserve currency, that foreign nations wish to hold as foreign exchange (FX) reserves, must be willing to supply the world with an extra supply of its currency in order to fulfill world demand for these FX reserves, leading to a trade deficit.
Alvin Harvey Hansen was an American economist who taught at the University of Minnesota and was later a chair professor of economics at Harvard University. Often referred to as "the American Keynes", he was a widely read popular author on economic issues, and an influential advisor to the government on economic policy. Hansen helped create the Council of Economic Advisors and the Social Security system. He is best remembered today for introducing Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1930s and 40s.
The bancor was a supranational currency that John Maynard Keynes and E. F. Schumacher conceptualised in the years 1940–1942 and which the United Kingdom proposed to introduce after World War II. The name was inspired by the French banque or. This newly created supranational currency would then be used in international trade as a unit of account within a multilateral clearing system—the International Clearing Union—which would also need to be founded.
Karl Gustav Cassel was a Swedish economist and professor of economics at Stockholm University. Cassel was among the most prominent economists in the world in the interwar period. He made contributions to the study of value, monetary policy, and business cycles.
In monetary economics, the demand for money is the desired holding of financial assets in the form of money: that is, cash or bank deposits rather than investments. It can refer to the demand for money narrowly defined as M1, or for money in the broader sense of M2 or M3.
Paul Davidson was an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy from a position critical of mainstream economics.
An international monetary system is a set of internationally agreed rules, conventions and supporting institutions that facilitate international trade, cross border investment and generally the reallocation of capital between states that have different currencies. It should provide means of payment acceptable to buyers and sellers of different nationalities, including deferred payment. To operate successfully, it needs to inspire confidence, to provide sufficient liquidity for fluctuating levels of trade, and to provide means by which global imbalances can be corrected. The system can grow organically as the collective result of numerous individual agreements between international economic factors spread over several decades. Alternatively, it can arise from a single architectural vision, as happened at Bretton Woods in 1944.
The Macmillan Committee, officially known as the Committee on Finance and Industry, was a committee, composed mostly of economists, formed by the British Labour government after the 1929 stock market crash to determine the root causes of the depressed economy of the United Kingdom. The Macmillan Committee was formed in 1929 by Royal Command 3897, and it was tasked with determining whether the contemporary banking and financial system was helping or hindering British trade and industry. Scottish lawyer Hugh Pattison Macmillan was named as its chairman, although due to his lack of economic or financial expertise, he largely "remained in the background". Other members of the committee included Ernest Bevin, Lord Bradbury, R. H. Brand, Theodore Gregory, John Maynard Keynes, and Reginald McKenna.
The Cambridge equation formally represents the Cambridge cash-balance theory, an alternative approach to the classical quantity theory of money. Both quantity theories, Cambridge and classical, attempt to express a relationship among the amount of goods produced, the price level, amounts of money, and how money moves. The Cambridge equation focuses on money demand instead of money supply. The theories also differ in explaining the movement of money: In the classical version, associated with Irving Fisher, money moves at a fixed rate and serves only as a medium of exchange while in the Cambridge approach money acts as a store of value and its movement depends on the desirability of holding cash.
The 1922–1924 monetary reform of the Soviet Union was a set of monetary policies which was implemented in the Soviet Union as a part of the Soviet government’s New Economic Policy. The principal objectives of the reform included stopping the effects of hyperinflation, establishing a unified medium of exchange and the creation of a more-independent central bank.