IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v18y2013i1p43-63.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Politics of Liberal Financial Governance and the Gold Standard

Author

Listed:
  • Samuel Knafo

Abstract

This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles over monetary governance which involved significant constraints for capitalist investors. Its institutions helped establish a new structure for exerting control over finance. By resituating the gold standard in a broader historical perspective, I show how nineteenth-century monetary governance, far from leading to a retreat of the state, established in fact the foundations of a new form of state intervention: modern central banking.

Suggested Citation

  • Samuel Knafo, 2013. "The Politics of Liberal Financial Governance and the Gold Standard," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(1), pages 43-63, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:18:y:2013:i:1:p:43-63
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2012.656083
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2012.656083
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13563467.2012.656083?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hall,Rodney Bruce, 2008. "Central Banking as Global Governance," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521727211.
    2. Eichengreen, Barry, 1996. "Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195101133.
    3. Hall,Rodney Bruce, 2008. "Central Banking as Global Governance," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521898614.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Miguel Otero-Iglesias & Federico Steinberg, 2013. "Is the Dollar Becoming a Negotiated Currency? Evidence from the Emerging Markets," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3), pages 309-336, June.
    2. Paul Langley & John H Morris, 2020. "Central banks: Climate governors of last resort?," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(8), pages 1471-1479, November.
    3. Diessner, Sebastian & Lisi, Giulio, 2019. "Masters of the ‘masters of the universe’? Monetary, fiscal and financial dominance in the Eurozone," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 100754, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Tim Marple, 2021. "The social management of complex uncertainty: Central Bank similarity and crisis liquidity swaps at the Federal Reserve," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 16(2), pages 377-401, April.
    5. Eleni Tsingou, 2015. "Club governance and the making of global financial rules," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(2), pages 225-256, April.
    6. Jeffrey M. Chwieroth & Timothy J. Sinclair, 2013. "How you stand depends on how we see: International capital mobility as social fact," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(3), pages 457-485, June.
    7. Peter J. Katzenstein & Stephen C. Nelson, 2013. "Reading the right signals and reading the signals right: IPE and the financial crisis of 2008," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(5), pages 1101-1131, October.
    8. Wäckerle, Manuel, 2013. "On the bottom-up foundations of the banking-macro nexus," Economics Discussion Papers 2013-5, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    9. Freeman, Dena, 2018. "De-democratisation and rising inequality: the underlying cause of a worrying trend," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 88038, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    10. Miguel Otero-Iglesias & Federico Steinberg, 2013. "Reframing the euro vs. dollar debate through the perceptions of financial elites in key dollar-holding countries," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(1), pages 180-214, February.
    11. Qiu, Christina M., 2022. "Regionalized liquidity: A cross-country analysis of mobile money deployment and inflation in developing economies," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    12. Aiginger, Karl, 2010. "The Great Recession vs. the Great Depression: Stylized facts on siblings that were given different foster parents," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 4, pages 1-41.
    13. Accominotti, Olivier, 2012. "London Merchant Banks, the Central European Panic, and the Sterling Crisis of 1931," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 72(1), pages 1-43, March.
    14. Barbara McKiernan, 1998. "Monetary disturbance or financial market collapse: tests of two theories of the Great Depression," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(2), pages 133-144.
    15. Ben S. Bernanke & Vincent R. Reinhart & Brian P. Sack, 2004. "Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound: An Empirical Assessment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 35(2), pages 1-100.
    16. A. Malliaris & Mary Malliaris, 2013. "Are oil, gold and the euro inter-related? Time series and neural network analysis," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 40(1), pages 1-14, January.
    17. Marianna Astore & Michele Fratianni, 2016. ""We can't pay": How Italy cancelled war debts after Lausanne," Mo.Fi.R. Working Papers 129, Money and Finance Research group (Mo.Fi.R.) - Univ. Politecnica Marche - Dept. Economic and Social Sciences.
    18. Mervyn Allister King, 1993. "Debt Deflation: Theory and Evidence," FMG Discussion Papers dp175, Financial Markets Group.
    19. Alejandro Ayuso‐Díaz & Antonio Tena‐Junguito, 2020. "Trade in the shadow of power: Japanese industrial exports in the interwar years," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 73(3), pages 815-843, August.
    20. Edwards, Sebastian, 2020. "Change of monetary regime, contracts, and prices: Lessons from the great depression, 1932–1935," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:18:y:2013:i:1:p:43-63. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cnpe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.