Money Doctoring after World War II: Arthur I. Bloomfield and the Federal Reserve Missions to South Korea

Michele Alacevich and Pier Asso (francesco.asso@unipa.it)

History of Political Economy, 2009, vol. 41, issue 2, 249-270

Abstract: We explore the foreign economic policy activities of Arthur I. Bloomfield, a prominent economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the 1940s and the 1950s. During the cold war, Bloomfield headed several missions to South East Asia, assisting local authorities in shaping new foreign exchange regimes and banking institutions. Bloomfield's most successful mission concerned the constitution of a new central bank in South Korea, established in June 1950. In line with the Fed's new strategy established by Robert Triffin, head of the Latin American section, Bloomfield moved away from the dogmatic style of Edwin Kemmerer that dominated U.S. overseas missions in the first half of the twentieth century; “Southern†economies, in fact, rather than benefiting from Kemmerer's policies, had been increasingly hit by cyclical instability. According to Triffin and Bloomfield, U.S. overseas missions should loosen constraints on the activity of economic institutions and policy authorities, in order to increase their effectiveness as guarantors of financial stability and promoters of national development. We examine this episode in the light of the U.S. postwar foreign economic relations and the concept of “embedded liberalism.†The Bloomfield missions to South Korea show with great clarity the principal features of the Fed's new foreign strategy and the need to examine the actual advisory activity of Fed economists during the 1940s: they were at the intersection between domestic and international political and economic systems. Ultimately, they played a major role in forging the actual foreign policy of the United States.

Keywords: Arthur I. Bloomfield; Federal Reserve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/41/2/249.full.pdf+html link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:41:y:2009:i:2:p:249-270

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster (pauldude@duke.edu).