IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-37149-2_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Franco-German Dollar Union that Did Not Take Place

In: Euro Crash

Author

Listed:
  • Brendan Brown

Abstract

In that wonderful cartoon of Jacques Faizant depicting the historic ceremony in January 1963 at which the Franco-German friendship treaty was signed, President De Gaulle says to Chancellor Adenauer (in their 70s and 80s respectively) ‘hurry up Conrad, you are not immortal’. Adenauer’s hesitation stemmed from concern that de Gaulle was trying to wean Germany away from its close alliance with the US. The real pity of that moment emerges now, almost a half-century later. If only the two heads of state had agreed then on a monetary union between France and Germany. And it would have been so simple given that both countries were on the dollar standard within the context of the Bretton Woods international monetary agreement. The Deutsche mark and French franc would have become fully convertible into each other at the par exchange rate between them (all margins of fluctuation extinguished), while a Franco-German authority would have steered the growth of the monetary base (for the union) so as to keep the common currency within its permitted range of fluctuation against the US dollar.

Suggested Citation

  • Brendan Brown, 2014. "The Franco-German Dollar Union that Did Not Take Place," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Euro Crash, edition 0, chapter 2, pages 23-33, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-37149-2_2
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137371492_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-37149-2_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.