Preface

In the following pages, I have partly reproduced and considerably developed my memorandum on The Monetary Aspects of the Raw Materials Problem (Les aspects monétaires du problème des matières premières), presented in April 1937 to the International St

The extension of the Marshall plan appropriations for a second year is among the foremost issues to be faced immediately by the new Congress.

An international stabilization of currencies is not one of the problems which are in the foreground of current economic discussion.

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Stripped of technicalities and of short-run considerations the controversy over exchange rates: fixed or flexible, is essentially an aspect of the broader controversy over international economic integration (on the basis of the price mechanism and a common standard of value) as opposed to economic nation

U.S. foreign economic policy, 1945–53, has been a $40-billion disappointment.

To an itinerant economist one of the salient contrasts between current American and European thinking lies in the attitudes towards the significance and the management of money. What is still a ‘Great Debate’ in the U.S. has been virtually settled in Western Europe.

The Monetary Component of an ‘Atlantic Grand Design’

The Atlantic concept is basic to the policies of the United States and of Western Europe in the cold war. NATO in the military field (and, virtually, in the broader field defined by Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty) and the O.E.C.D.

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The present concern over monetary reconstruction—which is taking the form of proposals for a reform of the International Monetary Fund—is the child of worry over impending shortages of international reserves (i.e. of international liquidity).

This summer the gathering doubts about the strength of the U.S. economy, reflected in the stock-market plunge and the flagging of business enthusiasm, were accompanied—and indeed reinforced—by renewed uneasiness about the strength of the dollar.