International trade

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1758394757

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136209

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Taussig, Frank William http://d-nb.info/gnd/120199459

Title:: International trade

Place of publication:: New York, NY

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: XXI, 425 Seiten; graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part II. Problems of verification

Collection:: Economics Books

276 INTERNATIONAL TRADE ro a results which would presumably come in the long run do come at once and without a hitch. The mechanism of outflow of money, fall- ing prices, increasing exports, declining imports — all this automatic readjustment — does not work out its results in one year, or two, or three. It has been abundantly set forth in the preceding pages how long a time must be allowed before the eventual consequences appear, before the final readjustment can be expected. It is not to be supposed that a sudden huge remittance can be really brought about in this way. If we picture to ourselves a situation such as Adam Smith tried to analyze — subsidies which exceeded in amount the whole circulating medium of the country — and imag- ine a sudden export of perhaps half of the specie, we must imagine further a collapse of prices, a complete disorganization of trade and industry, a chaos in which neither exports nor imports could move quickly or in large volume, from which recovery and readjustment would be long and disastrous. Clearly nothing of the kind hap- pened in 1756-63. Nor can this sort of explanation fit the con- ditions of the Napoleonic period. The Ricardians imagined that changes in prices would follow quickly and smoothly from the inflow and outflow of specie; goods would also move in and out of the country with ease and promptness. The whole machinery would work without giving any trouble, without disconcerting either the business world or the public Treasury or the observing economist. This intellectually courageous simplification of the problem is quite out of accord with the experiences of their own times or of any later time when there was the sudden impact of a huge remittance. What then has happened? What was the course of events in the Seven Years War? What in the Napoleonic period? What in the Great War of 1914-1918, when Great Britain advanced enormous sums to her allies ? I have no more than a provisional hypothesis to offer; no more than this, at all events, on the earlier cases. As will be seen when the extraordinary operations of the Great War come to be con- sidered, they are susceptible, as regards the mechanism of inter- national payments, of a comparatively simple explanation. The

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