Past Experience in Flexibility

Abstract

An entire generation has grown up in Britain and in several other leading countries without any first-hand experience of the chaotic state of affairs caused by widely fluctuating exchanges during the years that followed the First World War, and again in the ’thirties. For this reason proposals for the adoption of floating exchanges, or at any rate of systems involving a more moderate degree of advanced flexibility, have come to be looked upon by many young people as bold innovations which, for that reason alone, appeal to those who fancy themselves in the role of unconventional reformers in revolt against the established order. American and British people under forty are entirely unfamiliar with the disadvantages of floating exchanges. Young theoretical and practical specialists only know about it from what they read in books. Little attention, if any, has been paid by the layman in the United States or in Britain to experience under flexibility since the war in France, in Italy and in Latin American countries.