The monetary views of Paul Einzig

Dominique Torre (1)

1 GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion

Paul Einzig was born in 1897 in Brasov but comes to London in 1919. From 1920, he begins to write articles for scienti c reviews, especially The Economic Journal, while he contributes more regularly to The Financial News, The Financial Times or The Banker. From this period to his death in 1973, he writes also many books, on very diverse subjects but devoted for the major part to monetary analysis and international nance. This paper concentrates on two subjects recurrently developed by Paul Einzig. The rst is the analysis of forward exchange market where Einzig observes anomalies in the covered interest rates parity. These observations, in accordance with those of Keynes, initiate a long controversy - still not closed -, on the origin of these anomalies. The second subject is less technical and more fundamental: what are in practice the respective properties of the di erent possible external exchange regimes? Einzig provides all his life long historical and analytical arguments to the reader interested in this question. He observes and comments regularly and in detail the crises and failures of di erent monetary arrangements. These observations and analyzes are still useful at a time when, after many years of trust in the corner solutions (free otation and monetary unions) the international community nds necessary to elaborate adequate regulations for the Eurozone policy-mix, or to control the excessive instability of the international capital flows.

Mots clés: Paul Einzig; covered interest rates parity; Gold Exchange Standard; free flotation; Romania

Domaines: Economies et finances

Dominique Torre. The monetary views of Paul Einzig. The 16th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET), May 2012, Saint Petersburg, Russia. ⟨halshs-00726126⟩