Intro -- Straining at the Anchor: The Argentine Currency Board and the Search for Macroeconomic Stability, 1880-1935 -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Part One: The Historical and Methodological Context -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Anchors Aweigh: The Drift toward Crisis in the 1880s -- Part Two: The Baring Crisis and Its Origins -- 3 A Monetary and Financial Wreck: The Baring Crisis, 1890-91 -- 4 Collision Course: Macroeconomic Policies and the Crash -- Part Three: The Making of the Belle Epoque -- 5 Relaunching the Gold Standard: From Monetary "Anemia" to "Plethora" and the Political Economy of Resumption, 1891-99 -- 6 Calm Before a Storm: The Gold Standard During the Belle Époque, 1899-1914 -- Part Four: The Travails of the Interwar Years -- 7 Distress Signals: Financial Fragility in the Interwar Period -- 8 Bailing Out: Internal versus External Convertibility -- 9 Steering through the Great Depression: Institutions, Expectations, and the Change of Macroeconomic Regime -- Part Five: Postscript -- 10 Postscript -- Appendix 1 Historical Statistics -- Appendix 2 The Law of National Guaranteed Banks -- Appendix 3 Money Supply Periodization, 1884-1913 -- Appendix 4 Money and Exchange Rates, 1884-1913 -- Appendix 5 Instituto Movilizador de Inversiones Bancarias -- Appendix 6 Humor, Politics, and the Economy -- References -- Name Index -- Subject Index.

The "Argentine disappointment"-why Argentina persistently failed to achieve sustained economic stability during the twentieth century-is an issue that has mystified scholars for decades. In Straining the Anchor, Gerardo della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor provide many of the missing links that help explain this important historical episode. Written chronologically, this book follows the various fluctuations of the Argentine economy from its postrevolutionary volatility to a period of unprecedented prosperity to a dramatic decline from which the country has never fully recovered. The authors examine in depth the solutions that Argentina has tried to implement such as the Caja de Conversión, the nation's first currency board which favored a strict gold-standard monetary regime, the forerunner of the convertibility plan the nation has recently adopted. With many countries now using-or seriously contemplating-monetary arrangements similar to Argentina's, this important and persuasive study maps out one of history's most interesting monetary experiments to show what works and what doesn't.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.