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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

NY Sun Article by John Mueller Calls for Drastic Monetary Change

A thank you to a reader for pointing me to this article by John D. Mueller appearing in the NY Sun. This article suggests that the current pandemic and related economic disruption offers an opportunity to look back at the work of a French economist for some historical perpsective.


We featured an article that included some comments to us from John D. Mueller back in 2017. Mr. Mueller is the Lehrman Institute Fellow in Economics. Below is an excerpt from his recent NY Sun Editorial.

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"As President Trump charts his course back to prosperity, the confusing economic situation is signaling that the best sage for him to consult would be Jacques Rueff. He was the French economist who, during a long career, advised Premier Henri Poincarè in the 1920s and President de Gaulle in the years after World War II.

It was Rueff who first explained the relationship between monetary policy of central banks and inflation and between the fiscal policies of elected governments and unemployment. He steered France to prosperity not once but twice by hewing to a policy of honest money defined in gold.

What is so apt about Rueff is that he emerged in the wake of one of the worst pandemics in history. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 50 million persons, 675,000 in America. It superimposed medical insult upon monetary injury."




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