The Interwar Years, 1918-1939

1. The Interwar Years, 1918-1939 By: Laurie Linscomb

2. The Interwar Years • Labor forces and productive capacity had been reduced sharply through was losses. • This caused price levels to be higher everywhere at the war’s conclusion in 1918. • Governments financed their purchases simply by printing the money they needed which caused a sharp rise in money supplies and price levels.

3. The Fleeting Return to Gold • The United States returned to gold in 1919. • Prices tended to adjust according the amount of gold circulating in an economy, which had effects on the flows of goods and services: the current account. • Price specie flow mechanism is the adjustment of prices as gold flows into or out of a country, causing an adjustment in the flow of goods. • An inflow of gold. • An outflow of gold.

4. The Fleeting Return to Gold • Realizing that gold supplies might be inadequate to meet central banks’ demands for international reserves, the Genoa Conference sanctioned a partial gold exchange standard in which smaller countries could hold as reserves the currencies of several large countries whose own international reserves would consist entirely of gold.

5. The Fleeting Return to Gold • In 1925, Britain returned to the gold standard be pegging the pound to gold at the prewar price. • Britain’s price level had been falling since the war in 1925. • The Bank of England was therefore forced to follow contractionary monetary policies that contributed to severe unemployment.

6. The Fleeting Return to Gold • British stagnation in the 1920’s accelerated London’s decline as the worlds leading financial center. • Britain’s gold reserves were limited, however, and the country’s persistent stagnation did little to inspire confidence in its ability to meet its foreign obligations. • The onset of the Great Depression in1929 was shortly followed by bank failures throughout the world.

7. International Economic Disintegration • As the depression continued, many countries renounced the gold standard and allowed their currencies to float in the foreign exchange market. • The United States left the gold standard in 1933. • Countries that clung to the gold standard without devaluing their currencies suffered most during the Great Depression.

8. International Economic Disintegration • The United States returned to the gold standard in 1934. • This is because they had raised the dollar price of gold from $26.67 to $35 per ounce. • Recent scholarship shows that the international gold standard played a central role in starting, deepening, and spreading the 20th century’s greatest economic downturn.

9. International Economic Disintegration • The gold standard was the key culprit of the waves of bank failures around the world that accelerated the world’s downward economic spiral. • Perhaps the clearest evidence of the gold standard’s role is the contrasting behavior of output and the price level in countries that left the gold standard relatively early, such as Britain, and those that stubbornly hung on.

10. International Economic Disintegration • The Smoot-Hawley tariff imposed by the United States in 1930 had a damaging effect on employment abroad. • A measure that raises domestic welfare is called beggar-thy-neighbor policy when it benefits the home country only because it worsens economic conditions abroad. • This realization that inspired the blueprint for the postwar international monetary system, the Bretton Woods Agreement.