Allyn Abbott Young Quotes
A stable currency and an excessive external debt are incompatible. A similar relation holds as between a country's currency and an excessive internal debt
Allyn Abbott Young, 1876–1929, Economist, “War Debts, External and Internal”, Foreign Affairs, March 1924
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President Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican did not agree with this view as it was he who led America to abandon the gold standard to back its money.
Specie is a word for paper money. Such political artifices were well known in More’s time, and yet still exist in many countries.
At the time, there was no United States currency. Private banks in some of the states issued their own money. A dollar from Georgia might only be worth 75 cents in New York.
At the time there was a worldwide recession and although the United States economy was not in very good shape, it was better than the other democracies and those nations with better economies then were authoritarian governments where investors did not trust their currencies. As a result, many wealthy people and businesses throughout the world were willing to lend money to the United States as a safe haven.
FDR was then a candidate for the Democratic Vice Presidential Nomination. This statement shocked some of the conservative French and British delegates and officials such as Ramsay MacDonald, Georges Bonnet, and Neville Chamberlain, but economist John Maynard Keynes strongly approved of Roosevelt Roosevelt’s statements. At issue was whether or not the major currency powers should confer frequently and set the international currency exchange rates or should the rates float and be determined at any point by the free market in currency. FDR held the latter view which was opposed to the positions of the conservative banker-oriented delegates from the European counties, However Roosevelt’s statement was considered “harsh” and “vituperative” by the conservatives and the entire conference collapsed over them. FDR admitted that perhaps he had been too strong and blunt in his language. An irony of this quotation is that 80 years later the positions of liberals and conservatives had both flip-flopped. It became the conservatives who adopted the FDR free market for currency exchange while many liberals called for government intervention and agreement on exchange rates to prevent instability.
Allyn Abbott Young was an American economist. He was born into a middle-class family in Kenton, Ohio. He died aged 52 in London, his life cut short by pneumonia during an influenza epidemic. He was then at the height of his intellectual powers and current president of Section F of the British Association. Uniquely, Young had also been president of the American Statistical Association (1917) and the American Economic Association (1925).
