Professor Paul Hallwood has four chapters in the above titled book just published by Cambridge University Press in England.  The chapters are “Crash! Expectational Aspects of the Departures of the United Kingdom and United States from the Inter-War Gold Standard”;  “Realignment Expectations and the US Dollar, 1890–1897: Was There a ‘Peso’ Problem?”; “Credibility and Fundamentals: Were the Classical and Inter-War Gold Standards Well-Behaved Target Zones?”; and “Did Impending War in Europe Help Destroy the Gold Bloc in 1936? An Internal Inconsistency Hypothesis?”  All four chapters were written with Ronald MacDonald and Ian Marsh, and the book is edited by Michael D. Bordo and Ronald MacDonald.

 Hallwood’s chapters demonstrate that adherence to a fixed exchange regime imposes severe monetary and fiscal discipline on member countries – not unlike the Euro-zone today; that at some point this discipline can become unbearable, though the USA did ride out the free-silver movement in the 1890s; that the gold standard was heavily implicated in the generation of the Great Depression: and that it was also implicated in the French defeat by Germany in 1940 as France for too long accepted the fiscal constraint of gold, restraining its military spending, even while Germany remilitarized.

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