TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bordo,Michael D.
AU  - James,Harold
TI  - The Adam Klug Memorial Lecture: Haberler versus Nurkse: The Case for Floating Exchange Rates as an Alternative to Bretton Woods?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8545
PY  - 2001
Y2  - October 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8545
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8545.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Michael D. Bordo
Department of Economics
Rutgers University
New Jersey Hall
75 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel: 732/822-7152
Fax: 732/932-7416
E-Mail: bordo@econ.rutgers.edu

Harold James
History Department and Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544
E-Mail: hjames@princeton.edu
AB  - From the perspective of the late 1930s and 1940s the dominant view was that the inter-war currency experience was a financial disaster.  The view is perfectly encapsulated in the League of Nations' publication The Inter-war Currency Experience, the bulk of which was written by Ragnar Nurkse and published in 1944.  It was also the view behind the Keynes and White plans for international monetary reform, which culminated in the Bretton Woods conference and the establishment of the adjustable peg par value system buttressed by capital controls.  An alternative view to Nurkse was posited by Gottfried Haberler in Prosperity and Depression, also commissioned by the League of Nations and published in 1937.  In Prosperity and Depression Haberler made a strong intellectual case for floating exchange rates as a mechanism to insulate countries from the transmission of booms and depressions. In this paper we consider the views of Nurkse and Haberler on fixed and floating exchange rates and consider why Haberler's approach was not taken seriously until 1950s.  Our main conclusion is that Haberler himself failed to offer a sufficiently clear blueprint for his approach at the time, although he did come to it by 1953.  Moreover his views were counter to the ascending Keynesian paradigm.
ER  -