From the 1931 sterling devaluation to the breakdown of Bretton Woods: Robert Triffin’s evaluation of worldwide financial crises

Ivo Maes and Ilaria Pasotti in this Central Bank of Belgium paper focus on concepts of Robert Triffin:

Robert Triffin (1911-1993) was one of many essential protagonists within the worldwide financial debates within the postwar interval. He turned well-known along with his e book Gold and the Greenback Disaster, revealed in 1960, by which he predicted the top of the Bretton Woods system. In his evaluation there, Triffin was very a lot marked by the breakdown of the gold change normal within the early Nineteen Thirties. In his view, the expansion of overseas change reserves after World Battle Two repeated, however on a a lot bigger scale, their comparable growth after the First World Battle. Triffin argued that the gold change normal had been a extremely fragile development as funds may transfer out and in as a consequence of adjustments in relative rates of interest and/or adjustments in change fee expectations. The main focus of this paper is on Triffin’s evaluation of the sterling devaluation of 1931 all through his writings, from his early articles on the 1935 devaluation of the Belgian franc to his writings after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. The intention is twofold: to offer an evaluation of Triffin’s view of the interwar interval and assess the importance of his evaluation of the interwar interval for his view on the Bretton Woods system.