1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Record American deficits piled up through the late 1960s, yet confidence in the dollar held—a puzzle Haberler and Willett resolve by arguing that the world had drifted onto a de facto dollar standard in which the currency was inconvertible into gold for large official sums, and that the very gap between the gold stock and dollar liabilities made mass conversion unthinkable. From this they draw the case for what they call benign neglect: because the United States cannot unilaterally devalue a currency everyone else pegs to, it should pursue domestic stability and curb inflation while leaving adjustment to surplus countries, which may accumulate dollars, appreciate, expand, or lower trade barriers. Written just before the August 1971 suspension of convertibility, the essay presses for modest exchange-rate flexibility—crawling pegs, wider bands, floating—over the distortions of capital and trade controls.
whenever a serious dilemma or conflict between the requirements of external and internal equilibrium arises, domestic policy objectives should take precedence over balance-of-payments considerations