The Adam Klug Memorial Lecture: Haberler Versus Nurkse: The Case for Floating Exchange Rates as an Alternative to Bretton Woods?

From the perspective of the late 1930s and 1940s, the dominant view was that the interwar experience was a financial disaster. This view is perfectly encapsulated in the League of Nations’ publication The Interwar Currency Experience, the bulk of which was written by Ragnar Nurkse, published in 1944 and in the League ’s parallel 1945 publication, Economic Stability in the Post-War World. It also was the view behind the Keynes and White plans for international monetary reform, which culminated in the Bretton Woods conference.