Tom Walker wrote: > > Multilateral Clearing > E. F. Schumacher > Economica > New Series, Vol. 10, No. 38 (May, 1943), pp. 150-165 > > On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Tom Walker <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: > > > I believe this was E.F. Schumacher's idea that Keynes adopted.
An unsettled question. Iwamoto, Takekazu (1997): Keynes Plan for an International Clearing Union Reconsidered, Kyoto University. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/56821 http://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/56821/1/ece001_178.pdf [...] Another inference about such writers is E.F. Schumacher. Although the Schumacher plan was published in May 1943 immediately after the Keynes plan were published in April, it has been in private circulation since November 1942.[6] Although Moggridge insists that "there is no record of Keynes's comments on the [Schumacher] proposal and no indication that it influenced the development of Keynes's ideas" (ibid., p.2l), the daughter of Schumacher, Barbara Wood, recorded in hers father's biography that Keynes gave his impression of Schumacher proposal to Sir Wilfred Eady. Indeed it may be recognized that Schumacher plan bears some resemblance to the Keynes plan at any rate, but it remains an unsettled question how his plan influenced the development ofthe Keynes plan. [7] [...] [6] Schumacher (1943, p. 150). [7] The Schumacher plan, called "Pooling Clearing", was summarized as follows: ( i ) every country sets up an independent agency called the National Clearing Fund (NCF), which receive its own national currency from the home importers and disburses its own national currency to the home exporters; ( ii ) the NCF of deficit countries would be left with a balance of cash in hand and should use such cash by purchasing Treasury bills on the one hand, and the NCF of surplus countries would be in need of cash and should raise such cash by selling Treasury bills on the other hand; (iii) every country agrees to set up an clearing house called International Clearing Office (lCO) as Trustee in the pooling of uncleared balances; (iv) all cash balances accumulating in the NCF of the deficit countries are deemed to be taken over by the ICO on the one hand, and the NCF of the surplus countries are deemed to own each a share in the lCO on the other hand. In this way, every national currency is made into a world currency, whereby the creation of a new international currency becomes unnecessary. It is important that the holding·of surpluses, not being convertible into gold or interest-earning investment, becomes unprofitable and risky because the Pool's assets always the weakest currency in the world. If the surpluses are made unattractive and potential surplus countries are discourage from achieving a surplus, they are obliged to speed up imports by an expansionist internal policy. In this sense, such plan is said to attempt to throw the burden of adjustment primarily on the shoulder of the surplus countries (Schumacher, 1943, pp.157-8). This Schumacher plan is a kind of the game of the old maid in which the surplus, denominated by the weakest currency, would be a joker every surplus countries wanted to part with. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
