Sammendrag
The book tells story of central bank cooperation from a British, as well as from a Hungarian perspective, from the beginning of the 1920s to the “small crisis” of 1929, "testing" the contemporary monetary regime and policies emerging in thewake of World War I also from the point of view of a predominantly agricultural, peripheral national economy in Europe. It identifies and analyzes broader tendencies of international or global significance, showing the ways in which tensions and rivalries among the major centers of the European and world economy (London and New York) affected significant policy choices of economies in a weaker or clearly peripheral position. It explores how the very same wave of liberal mood which so intensely disapproved the growth of the interventionist state during and after the war and which nurtured the understanding that a return to the gold standard was a necessity, gave also rise to innovative ideas of a programmatically transnational, anti-political and institutionalized network of central banks; a network the main aim of which was to promote the interests and maintain the stability of the global capitalist system. It revelas that the new means (central bank cooperation) was, due to the constraints set by contemporary perceptions and understanding, to begin with, deployed to serve the wrong objectives: to propagate and maintain the regime of stable exchange rates (gold standard), even though the regime itself constituted a major obstacle for a number of economies in their way towards successful longer term adjustment (upon which sustained exchange rate stability itself necessarily depended).
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