This book offers a reassessment of the international monetary problems that led to the global economic crisis of the 1930s. The author shows how policies, in conjunction with the imbalances created by World War I, gave rise to the global crisis of the 1930s.

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Argues that the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Depression occurred as a result of poor decisions on the part of four central bankers who jointly attempted to reconstruct international finance by reinstating the gold standard.

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Eichengreen argues that the gold standard of the 1920s set the stage for the Depression of the 1930s by heightening the fragility of the international financial system, and was the mechanism that transmitted the destabilizing impulse from the USA to the rest of the world.