Word: gold
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dollar Discrimination. One policy that Anderson wants changed promptly is the discrimination by European nations against dollar imports. Such restrictions may have been necessary in the early postwar years, when these countries had a shortage of dollars. But now, said Anderson, prosperous European nations with big stocks of gold and short-term dollar assets (see chart) no longer "have any balance-of-payments justification for discriminatory restrictions." Unless Europe cooperates by eliminating such restrictions, Anderson hinted, the U.S. may have to take action-perhaps a cut in foreign aid-to correct the balance...
...they met last week in Washington, delegates to the meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund studiously avoided discussion of one subject: a change in the world's gold policy. Reason for the reticence: their host, the U.S. Treasury, is unequivocally opposed to any change. Since the U.S. is the world's largest gold holder, no adjustment can be made without U.S. initiative. Yet speculation about a change continues to be an irrepressible topic of conversation among financiers and statesmen around the world...
Talk about a change takes two forms. One is that the U.S. should junk its present managed-money system (in which gold is used only as a currency reserve and to settle international accounts) and return to the fully convertible gold standard, abandoned in 1933, under which dollars could be exchanged for gold coins. The other-usually joined with the first-is that the U.S. should double or triple the present gold price of $35 an ounce, thus devaluing the dollar and in effect automatically increasing the monetary value of the official gold holdings of the free world...
Among the chief advocates of a return to the full gold standard for both the U.S. and European nations are French Economic Adviser Jacques Rueff, the architect of France's successful financial-austerity program, and Philip Cortney, president of Coty, Inc. and chairman of the U.S. Council of the International Chamber of Commerce...
They, like the rest of a small but dedicated group of economists, believe that the gold standard is the only answer to the world's present monetary problems, such as inflation and a concentration of capital. They believe that a return to the rigid fiscal discipline of the gold standard would act as a brake on inflation by preventing governments from overspending, head off world recessions by doing away with the excesses that lead to them. A full gold standard, as they see it, would also put a damper on sudden expansions of credit not backed by gold, help...