Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen enters this wiki as a cited opponent, not a member of its tradition. His account of the interwar gold standard is the mainstream verdict that Austrian monetary writing has to answer, and the corpus holds it in the form his critics quote.

Who He Is

Barry Eichengreen is an American economic historian of money and international finance, working in the Keynesian tradition. Salerno classes him among the economists whose books elaborate the case against the gold standard, alongside the monetarist argument he treats separately.

His 1992 Golden Fetters is the work at issue: the argument that the reconstructed interwar gold-exchange standard transmitted the American shock to the rest of the world, magnified it, and blocked the policy responses that might have offset it — so that recovery arrived, country by country, in the order countries left gold.

Held Through His Opponent

Eichengreen reaches these pages through the economist arguing against him. Salerno quotes Eichengreen’s own summary of the book at length in order to argue against it, which is why the thesis can be stated here in Eichengreen’s words rather than paraphrased. The quotation and its use appear in The Gold Standard.

That is a deliberate arrangement rather than a gap. A corpus that only ever quoted its own side would leave its central monetary claim looking unopposed; the strongest version of the counter-argument is worth carrying in the original.

Where the Disagreement Sits

The dispute is not primarily about the facts of 1929–1933 but about what the gold standard was doing in them. Eichengreen reads the metal as the transmission channel and the binding constraint. The Austrian reply, developed across Money and Banking, locates the cause in the prior credit expansion the gold-exchange standard permitted — so that the constraint Eichengreen faults is the point, and what failed was the attempt to have a gold standard and an elastic currency at once.

See Also

• Golden Fetters - the 1992 book this reference exists for
• The Gold Standard - where his thesis is quoted and answered
• Joseph T. Salerno - the Austrian economist who quotes him in order to rebut him
• Money, Sound and Unsound - the volume carrying that quotation
• Money and Banking

Sources

• Money, Sound and Unsound - Salerno quoting Eichengreen’s summary of Golden Fetters while arguing against it