Fixed Ideas of Money

Tobias Straumann is Lecturer in the History Department of the University of Zurich. He studied at the Universities of Bielefeld and Zurich and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. After a career in economic journalism, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and lecturer at the University of Lausanne. Dr Straumann has worked in the fields of Swiss economic history and European financial and monetary history. He has published articles in the Journal of Contemporary History, the European Review of Economic History, and the Historische Zeitschrift.

• Introduction; Part I. The Interwar Years: 1. Early divergence; 2. The return to prewar parity; 3. Fear of experiments; 4. The dissolution of the gold bloc; Part II. After Bretton Woods: 5. Fixed vs. floating; 6. Hard and soft pegs; 7. The Swiss exception; 8. Floating in the north; Conclusion.

'Tobias Straumann's excellent book breaks new ground. Informed by abundant research in archives and by the most recent theories from political economy, it provides an elegant and unified picture of the reasons why small nations in Western Europe have fixed their exchange rates and will prefer floating exchange rates.' Marc Flandreau, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva