Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (NBER Series on Long-term Factors in Economic Development) - Softcover

`brilliant new book'Newsweek

`This is a first-rate book. It should become an instant classic in the field.' Peter Temin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

`Eichengreen illuminates the role of the gold standard in his masterly analysis of the global economic and political forces that produced the Great Depression and economic recovery after 1933.' Anna J. Schwartz, National Bureau of Economic Research

`Golden Fetters compels us to re-examine familiar ideas about economic pathology in the interwar period and the way the gold standard functioned before the First World War ... This is the most important contribution to the subject since the works of Brown and Nurske, more than four decades ago.' Peter B. Kenen, Princeton University

`It looks to me to be quite a tour de force, by the outstanding contemporary scholar of the 20th century history of the international monetary system.' John Williamson, Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics

`Professor Eichengreen has succeeded in providing a rare blend of well-balanced economic and historical analysis ... There is no doubt in my mind that historians will see Golden Fetters as the standard work on the subject for years to come.' Gianni Toniolo, University of Venice

`[Eichengreen's] book provides new and insightful analyses of how the gold standard worked and its role in the economic crisis of the interwar years.' David Hale, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, Kemper Financial Services Corporation

`Anyone tempted to make historical parallels between the EMS and the gold standard should read Barry Eichengreen's scholarl account ... his book is written with a clarity that allows one to identify both elements of the gold standard that were unique and those that are common to any regime of fixed exchange rates.' Times Literary Supplement

`will quickly become the standard work ... it is superbly written and achieves its objective of being accessible to the general reader ... this is an excellent book and ... quite compelling reading'Business History

This new international history of the inter-war gold standard, which will quickly become the standard work and should have immediate publication in paperback to encourage the widest readership, succeeds at a number of levels ... it is superbly written and achieves its objective of being accessible to the general reader ... it shows how national histories can be knitted together into a coherent analysis of an international economic crisis ... it breaks new ground in two important respects ... this is an excellent book and ... quite compelling reading.'Business History

This book is a reassessment of the international monetary crises of the post-World War I period that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It also analyses the responses of the world economic powers to the Depression and how new monetary policies set the stage for the watershed post-World War II system established at Bretton Woods. It offers new theories of what effect the Great Depression had on the collapse of the world monetary system, and what effect the collapse had on deepening and prolonging the Depression, by exploring the link between global economic crisis and the the gold standard (the framework for international monetary affairs until 1931). The events described had a profound effect upon twentieth-century history: the Depression abetted the rise of Hitler and the demise of the gold standard is a historical cause of inflation.