Robert Triffin

Ivo Maes is Senior Advisor at the Economics and Research Department of the National Bank of Belgium and a Professor, Robert Triffin Chair, at the Université catholique de Louvain, as well as at ICHEC Brussels Management School. He previously served as a member of the Committee for Institutional Reform of the West African Monetary Union and as the President of the Council of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. He has been a visiting professor at Duke University (USA), the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and the Università Roma Tre. Ilaria Pasotti is a researcher and an archivist. She has a Ph.D. in History of Economic Thought from the University of Florence. From 2009 to 2014 she was a researcher at the Catholic University of Milan. She has been a visiting researcher at the National Bank of Belgium, the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Cambridge University.

• Preface by Jacques de LarosièreIntroduction: A Monk in Economists' ClothingAbbreviationsFigures and tables1 A Child of the Interwar Period1.1 Introduction1.2 Early Years1.3 Studies at Louvain and the Belgian Franc Devaluation of 19351.4 Graduate Studies at Harvard1.5 The Theory of Currency Overvaluation and the Belgian Devaluation1.6 Monopolistic Competition Theory1.7 A Difficult Year in Belgium and Return to Harvard2 Money Doctor in Latin America2.1 Introduction2.2 The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the Early 1940s2.3 Triffin's Vision of the Latin American Economies2.4 The Latin American Missions2.5 Triffin's Global View on the International Monetary System3 Architect of the European Payments Union3.1 Introduction3.2 The Early Years of the International Monetary Fund3.3 The European Economy and the Marshall Plan3.4 Triffin and the Exchange Rate Issue3.5 Triffin and the Creation of the European Payments Union3.6 The German Payments Crisis3.7 Triffin's Search for Destination3.8 Triffin's Retrospective View of the EPU4 Bretton Woods Cassandra 4.1 Introduction4.2 Yale and the Vietnam War4.3 Europe and the Money Muddle4.4 Gold and the Dollar Crisis4.5 Reform Debates in the 1960s4.6 The Demise of the Bretton Woods System4.7 The Paper-dollar Standard 5 Monetary Expert on Monnet's Action Committee for the United States of Europe 5.1 Introduction5.2 A Strong Advocate of the EPU Approach5.3 The Rome Treaty5.4 The Campaign for a European Reserve Fund5.5 The 1969 Hague Summit and the Werner Report6 Return to Belgium6.1 Introduction6.2 IMS: the "International Monetary Scandal"6.3 The European Monetary System6.4 The Development of the Private ECU Market7 EpilogueSources.

Robert Triffin was a distinguished Belgium-American economist who predicted the demise of the Bretton Woods system in several articles he wrote in the late-1950s and in two important books - Europe and the Money Muddle (1957) and Gold and the Dollar Crisis (1960). An account of his life and work was long overdue. With the publication of Robert Triffin: A Life, Ivo Maes and Ilaria Pasoti have repaired that omission.... The book draws upon an impressive array of published and unpublished material and a large number of interviews conducted by the authors. While Maes and Pasotti generally endorse Triffin's conclusions, the work is not a hagiography. On the contrary, it is an objective analysis of Triffin's contributions to economic thought and policy.