From Bretton Woods to the Float

Michael Beggs
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Michael Beggs: University of Sydney

Chapter 5 in Inflation and the Making of Australian Macroeconomic Policy, 1945–85, 2015, pp 139-175 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The following four quotations, from a range of political and analytical perspectives, all present what has become part of the common sense of political-economic history: that the transition from the Bretton Woods regime to a world of flexible or floating exchange rates imposed the discipline of the global economy on governments. This idea — that international constraint was a novelty of the post-Bretton Woods period — is contradicted by the argument stated in Chapter 2: that Australian macroeconomic policymakers were motivated to prioritise disinflation in the 1950s by the demands of ‘external balance’. Furthermore, I showed there that many economists of the 1950s and 1960s saw a flexible, if not floating, exchange rate as a way out of this constraint — an extra policy instrument and another degree of freedom:

Keywords: Exchange Rate; Foreign Direct Investment; Monetary Policy; Central Bank; Money Supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-26597-5_5

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137265975_5

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