Money and the Price Level Under the Gold Standard

1979 ◽  
Vol 89 (353) ◽  
pp. 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Barro
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 217-226
Author(s):  
Michal Kvasnicka

Since I am naturally biased in favor of the gold standard, I was glad when I found that Prof. Howden (2008) exerted effort to uproot the thesis presented in my paper «Stability of Gold ˆ Standard and Its Selected Consequences» (Kvasnicka, 2007) that the price level could be very unstable under the gold standard if the overall monetary stock of gold is relatively small, and one of its consequences, that this instability makes an independent restitution of the gold standard in a small country unlikely. No one would be happier than me if he succeeded. However, I will claim here that his critique failed. To show why, I will first summarize major points of my former paper and then comment on Prof. Howden’s critique. Since Prof. Howden concentrates only on the feasibility of the restitution of the gold standard in the present world, I will not defend all the propositions made in my former paper, but will confine myself to the question whether a small country adopting the gold standard independently in the present world would or would not suffer from the price level instability and trade cycles caused by such a gold standard.


2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1044-1077 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamfili M. Antipa

For almost 25 years between 1797 and 1821, the gold standard in Britain was suspended in order to finance the Napoleonic Wars, creating a paper pound or a fiat currency. Suspension was accompanied by substantial inflation and the accumulation of public debt. By identifying shifts in the spot exchange rate of paper pounds for gold, I document how contemporaries' expectations of how debt would be stabilized in the future shaped the pound's internal value. Thus, it is argued that during the “paper pound” period, fiscal prospects provided a third mechanism, beyond monetary and real factors, affecting the price level.


1945 ◽  
Vol 5 (04) ◽  
pp. 184-196
Author(s):  
F. W. Bacon

By currency stabilization we can mean one of two things. We can mean either the stabilization of the internal value of a currency—the quantity of goods and services that a unit of it will purchase inside the country concerned—or the ‘stabilization’ of its external exchange value in terms of the quantities of the currencies of other countries that it will purchase.The internal and external values of a currency are of course closely interconnected. There was a time, when the gold standard was working more or less smoothly, when the fixity of foreign exchanges was taken for granted, and discussion of currency stabilization was mainly concerned with the desirability and possibility of maintaining a stable internal price level. Now, however, as a result of the shrinking of international trade in the Great Depression and the consequent bedevilment of the exchanges in nearly every country, the focus of attention has shifted, as the Keynes and White plans clearly show, to the problem of achieving and maintaining equilibrium in the external balance of payments of the different countries while avoiding drastic exchange restrictions or, alternatively, wide and erratic fluctuations in their exchange rates.


2005 ◽  
Vol 173 (4S) ◽  
pp. 378-378
Author(s):  
Arthur C. Pinto
Keyword(s):  

2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 469-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Lam ◽  
Oleg Shvarts ◽  
Mehrdad Alemozaffarder ◽  
Hyung L. Kim ◽  
He-jing Wang ◽  
...  

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