Acceso usuarios
Paolo Pecorari, Andrea Cafarelli
Let us begin with a clarification about the starting and ending points of the present contribution, ca. 1919 and 1920 respectively:
Both years are to be taken not in strict and binding chronological succession, but rather in a logical, historical and historiographical sense. Considering both published and unpublished papers, one finds that already before the economic crisis of 1907 some of the best financial minds of the time (from Lexis to Wolf, from Knapp to Luzzatti) operated in a classic gold-standard multipolar system.
They rooted their theoretical positions not only in specific disciplinary dictates (anchoring them to more or less intrinsic links with domestic policies and international economies), but also in the concepts (or principles) of credibility and cooperation. Barry Eichengreen says that this echoed public confidence in the commitments made by government to a certain policy line. He insists on the importance of the links between finance and the real economy, sustained with different arguments by Kindleberger and Temin, as well as by Friedman and Schwartz, who relate those links to the propagation of the effects of crises.
