{"title":"The Golden Calf","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter evaluates how, by the spring of 1918, there really had been only one major policymaker to seriously reconsider the gold standard orthodoxy: Bank Governor Walter Cunliffe. But his scheme was less an attack on the gold standard than a tempering — a reforming — of it. He believed that modern financial innovations, better management of the financial system, and capital diversification could allow the UK to circulate a larger quantity of money without sacrificing the currency's convertibility into gold at the prewar rate. Over its eighteen months of work, Cunliffe Committee members interviewed more than a dozen expert witnesses and discussed memoranda from more. From simply reciting the incantations of the gold standard orthodoxy, these witnesses brought varied understandings of the practical operation of the monetary system in their domains of expertise: retail banking, manufacturing, and trading. Unshackled by formal training, these men felt free to think creatively about Britain's likely postwar struggles. Many, including the elite City financiers, even questioned the assumptions that underpinned orthodox theory, although they did so only inadvertently and only until the orthodox committee members maneuvered them into doing otherwise.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131816753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Central Bankers as Saviors?","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter reviews what the role of the central banker is. For those who clung to the version of the gold standard professed in the Cunliffe Committee's reports, the question itself was provocative. The term “central banker” was anathema to their dogma of a monetary order governed by “rules” rather than “discretion.” In theory, the gold standard system needs no such actor. Montagu Norman rejected this view categorically. More than any of his predecessors, he recognized the pivotal role that a central banker can play in determining the direction of the economy. Thus, the answer to the question of the role of the central banker changed radically in this period, in large part due to a most unexpected confluence of outlook between John Maynard Keynes and Norman. Both would have disclaimed it, but Keynes and Norman agreed that central bankers could — and should — serve as “saviors.”","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132982268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genesis and Exodus","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides an overview of the tragedy of England's return to gold. In the spring of 1925, Winston Churchill settled upon a plan to make Britain great again: he would restore the gold standard. This was Churchill's first significant policy initiative since becoming the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative government. However, in the wake of the First World War, Parliament extended the UK's wartime capital controls. This created an opportunity for the revered economist John Maynard Keynes to wage an aggressive, highly visible campaign against this very course of action. The book argues that the UK's particular path back onto gold in the 1920s followed directly, although not inevitably, from a combination of three things: a zealous and widespread faith in “orthodox” political economy; the reality that such beliefs were less an “orthodoxy” than a mythology; and the theocracy to which this gave rise.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132765941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sanhedrin","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter evaluates how, given the terrible consequences of England's “return to gold” in 1925, the conventional wisdom is that Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was either a fool or a knave. It argues that this characterization is unfair to Churchill. So far from discounting the employment implications of his decision, Churchill actually embraced the gold standard precisely because he thought it would decrease unemployment. Churchill seriously engaged John Maynard Keynes's attacks on the gold standard. That critique, however, focused on the tendency of the gold standard to generate transitional unemployment, whereas Churchill was concerned with the UK's chronic unemployment. As such, Churchill recognized that restoring the gold standard entailed transition costs that might well exacerbate unemployment in the short run. However, desperate to address the root of the UK's postwar woes, Churchill took the gamble that returning to gold would ultimately resolve this problem in the long run.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129331936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cunliffe “Consensus”","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the significance of the Cunliffe Committee's First Interim Report. The Cunliffe Committee's infamous First Interim Report stressed the consensus of opinion, both within the committee itself and between the committee and the witnesses it interviewed. A mere two pages long, the committee's Final Report simply restated the principal conclusions presented in the Interim Report. The committee claimed that they “have found nothing in the experiences of the war to falsify the lessons of previous experience that the adoption of a currency not convertible at will into gold or other exportable coin is likely in practice to lead to over-issue and to destroy the measure of exchangeable value and cause a general rise in all prices and an adverse movement in the foreign exchanges.” The chapter then shows how the experts who sat on and appeared before the Cunliffe Committee could not agree on the steps to take to return to gold, when to begin taking these steps, or even how to keep the UK on the gold standard once it had arrived there.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132517657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding “The Norman Conquest of $4.86”","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter highlights the “Norman Conquest of $4.86,” which has come to define how we understand the transformation of British monetary policy in the 1920s. Each element plays a crucial role in that canonical story. Beginning at the end, the key objective was to ensure a specific value of the pound in terms of the US dollar. This was both the goal and the measure of success: in the exchange rate market, one pound ought to be worth $4.86. Next, this was a conquest. It began with a struggle between contending claimants for England's throne, but it did not end until many of England's political, social, and economic institutions had been transformed. Finally, that struggle was won, totally and utterly, by Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England. Ultimately, the UK did return to the gold standard and Norman did transform — “Normanize” — the UK's monetary system.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"120 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116364388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Myths","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses how “returning to the international gold standard” in 1925 was really an abandonment of capital controls. But for all of the discussion of the abandonment of these capital controls, there has been almost no analysis of their introduction in the first place. Typically, the 1920 legislation is treated as a continuation of the capital controls introduced during the war. If one is to apply the conventional model to the UK in 1920, one would expect the Conservatives and right-wing Liberals to support the removal of the capital controls, and the Labourites and left-wing Liberals to support their extension and expansion. However, the Conservatives were the ones who pushed the gold export embargo through Parliament. Indeed, the very man who introduced the legislation in 1920, Stanley Baldwin, was the prime minister who presided over the controls' removal by Winston Churchill in 1925. At the same time, the Labour Party and the labor unions vigorously criticized the controls on the grounds that they introduced inflation and thus reduced real wages.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"440 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132099811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indulgence","authors":"James Morrison","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758423.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the counter-reformation orchestrated by the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee. The traditional view is that the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee largely ignored industry and labor. Empowered by the chants of finance and enchanted by the chorus of intelligentsia, these elites are said to have overruled the venal interests of the UK's producers. In fact, the opposite was true on both counts. As with the Cunliffe Committee, the members of the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee were far more reflective and nuanced than we have appreciated. Indeed, even the greatest exponents of the orthodoxy — Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Bradbury — had begun to rethink the gold standard in light of John Maynard Keynes's devastating critique. They did this even as the representatives of UK industry vigorously cast their lot behind the agenda of the City of London.","PeriodicalId":212337,"journal":{"name":"England's Cross of Gold","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132510012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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