Andrew Moravcsik Quotes
Currency pegs force a common policy on countries…
Currency Pegs are policies and commitments that countries make to sate that their currency henceforth will have a fixed relationship to another currency—usually the American Dollar, the English Pound or the Euro. If a second and even more countries also agree to peg their currency to the same, then the counties who are pegging can trust each other’s currency providing economic stability and facilitating trade.
Andrew Moravcsik Europe’s Ugly Future Foreign Affairs. November/December 2016 Volume 95, Number 6
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Roosevelt saw to it that the contents of the telegram was shown to the press. Then this statement was seen by the foreign delegates who viewed themselves as ‘international bankers”. They were outraged and the conference blew up with no significant action taken. Roosevelt was desperately trying to lead America out of the Great Depression which Herbert Hoover had left him with. The dollar had been falling in value since the 1929 crash and one of the likely outcomes of the conference was European and other nations putting a plan together to stop the fall of the dollar. FDR however, wanted the dollar to continue to fall. This would make it harder for Americans by buy imported products, but easier to employ more Americans making products for export. The people hurt most by The Depression did not buy any imported products, and what they needed was food, housing, clothing, education and medical care, none of which would be affected by a weaker dollar and more expensive imports. However, he did not want a political argument with the wealthy and upper middle class who wanted cheaper imports, so some people believe that he made it seem that he had committed a diplomatic blunder and that caused the conference to collapse.
Stieglitz was a critic of the Euro and the general notion of countries federating politically trying to have a common currency, He argued that the individual nations lose some of the major tools they have to affect the economy if things are not good economically.
“Pegged” exchange rates are a country’s money where the Government sets the value of the money in terms of some other currency—usually American dollars. The advantage of a pegged currency is that it is stable and does not fluctuate day to day. The disadvantage is that people realize that the value is artificial and other countries will not accept the pegged currency. Worse natives try and get as many dollars as they can because the fear that the Government will devalue and change the rate of exchange of the pegged currency.
England compromised. They did not give up their own currency—the Pound, but they did make the Euro legal tender, so both currencies can be used in England.
FDR was then a candidate for the Democratic Vice Presidential Nomination. This statement shocked some of the conservative French and British delegates and officials such as Ramsay MacDonald, Georges Bonnet, and Neville Chamberlain, but economist John Maynard Keynes strongly approved of Roosevelt Roosevelt’s statements. At issue was whether or not the major currency powers should confer frequently and set the international currency exchange rates or should the rates float and be determined at any point by the free market in currency. FDR held the latter view which was opposed to the positions of the conservative banker-oriented delegates from the European counties, However Roosevelt’s statement was considered “harsh” and “vituperative” by the conservatives and the entire conference collapsed over them. FDR admitted that perhaps he had been too strong and blunt in his language. An irony of this quotation is that 80 years later the positions of liberals and conservatives had both flip-flopped. It became the conservatives who adopted the FDR free market for currency exchange while many liberals called for government intervention and agreement on exchange rates to prevent instability.
What the Prime Minister was trying to say is that the buying power had not been diminished suddenly for local and non-imported items.
Andrew Maitland Moravcsik (born 1957) is professor of politics and international affairs, director of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and founding director of both the European Union Program and the International Relations Faculty Colloquium at Princeton University. He holds a lifetime appointment as distinguished affiliated professor at the Technische Universität München, in Munich, Germany, where he is affiliated with its Hochschule für Politik.
