ABSTRACT
Gold discoveries in California and Australia around midcentury tended to cheapen gold relative to silver and, through the operation of Gresham’s Law, to turn bimetallic standards into effective gold standards. Some economists worried about a serious loss of the purchasing powers of gold currencies, and the French economist Michel Chevalier even recommended a switch to the silver standard. To judge from parliamentary and academic discussions and pamphlet literature in Austria-Hungary and Russia, the chief motive for moving onto the gold standard was not so much unsatisfactory performance of the earlier monetary system as, rather, one of prestige: the gold standard was considered the most modern monetary system, the one most appropriate for advanced countries. Resemblances between the ecu and the Special Drawing Right, along with exchange-rate arrangements, suggest interpreting the European Monetary System as a Bretton Woods system in miniature.
