Historia

En David Glasner, una breve pero apasionante historia monetaria desde principios del XIX. Es un resumen de una conferencia del autor. Un buen, buen, resumen, donde es fácil ver que con o sin oro, siempre ha habido crisis, depresiones, auges y excesos.

But full restoration of gold standard in 1821 did not produce the promised monetary stability, with ongoing disturbances punctuated by financial crises every 10 years or so, in 1825, 1836, 1847, 1857 and 1866. 

...Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, there evolved a conception of the rules of the game governing the behavior of the monetary authorities under gold standard. However, the historical record is far from clear on the extent to which the rules of the game were actually observed. The record of equivocal adherence by the monetary authorities under the gold standard to the rules of the game can be interpreted to mean either that the rules of the game were unworkable or irrelevant — in which case following the rules would have been destabilizing — or that it was the failure to follow the rules of the game that caused the instabilities observed even in the heyday of the international gold standard (1880-1914)...  

Reproduzco los párrafos finales; un juicio sobre 2008 y una valoración de los objetivos monetarios únicos.

 if profit expectations worsen sufficiently, causing equilibrium real short-term interest rates to go negative, the only way to avoid a financial crisis is for the rate of inflation to increase sufficiently to allow the real short term interest rate to drop to the equilibrium level. If inflation doesn’t increase sufficiently to allow the real interest rate to drop to its equilibrium level, the expected rate of return on holding cash will exceed the expected return from holding capital causing a crash in asset prices, just what happened in October 2008.

 But the historical record, at any rate, does not offer much comfort to anyone who believes that adopting a following a simple rule is the answer to our monetary ills.