In recent decades, Tokyo, London, and New York have been the sites of credit bubbles of historically unprecedented magnitude. Central bankers have enjoyed almost unparalleled power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. In Central Banks and Gold, Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler explore how this financialized form of globalism first took shape a century ago, when Tokyo first joined London and New York as a major financial center.

As revealed here for the first time, close cooperation between central banks began along an unexpected axis, between London and Tokyo, around the year 1900, with the Bank of England's secret use of large Bank of Japan funds to intervene in the London markets. Central-bank cooperation became multilateral during World War I-the moment when Japan first emerged as a creditor country. In 1919 and 1920, as Japan, Great Britain, and the United States adopted deflation policies, the results of cooperation were realized in the world's first globally coordinated program of monetary policy. It was also in 1920 that Wall Street bankers moved to establish closer ties with Tokyo. Bytheway and Metzler tell the story of how the first age of central-bank power and pride ended in the disaster of the Great Depression, when a rush for gold brought the system crashing down. In all of this, we see also the quiet but surprisingly central place of Japan. We see it again today, in the way that Japan has unwillingly led the world into a new age of post-bubble economics.

About the Author

Simon James Bytheway is Professor of Financial History at Nihon University. He is the author of Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and Economic Development, 1859-2011. Mark Metzler is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter's Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle and coauthor of Central Banks and Gold: How Tokyo, London, and New York Shaped the Modern World,both from Cornell, and author of Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and The Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan.

Reviews

Engrossing.... This book is well written, clearly organized, and impeccably researched.... A fascinating read.

* Choice *

This book opens a new door through which we can look at history from a non-Anglocentric perspective...[for] students of global or world economic history of the modern era.

* American Historical Review *

Bytheway and Metzler's volume stimulates its readers to look more closely at the activities of central banks.... The book casts new light on the excep- tional role of Japan. The authors are persuasive in their argument that to understand and to evaluate today's world economy, today's financial globalization, it is imperative to include the important activities of the Japanese central bank and Japanese gold flows not only in contemporary times but in the period from 1896 to the start of the 1930s.

* JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE *

"Their [Bytheway and Meltzer's] eminently readable book demonstrates the continuing value of archival research, including those archives that would seem to have given up all their secrets."

* Journal of Japanese Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501704949
Author Simon James Bytheway
Format Hardback
Page Count 260
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm