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The Gold Standard and the Great Depression Barry Eichengreen & Peter Temin Share Twitter LinkedIn Email Working Paper 6060 DOI 10.3386/w6060 Issue Date June 1997 This paper, written primarily for historians, attempts to explain why political leaders and central bankers continued to adhere to the gold standard as the Great Depression intensified. We do not focus on the effects of the gold standard on the Depression, which we and others have documented elsewhere, but on the reasons why policy makers chose the policies they did. We argue that the mentality of the gold standard was pervasive and compelling to the leaders of the interwar economy. It was expressed and reinforced by the discourse among these leaders. It was opposed and finally defeated by mass politics, but only after the interaction of national policies had drawn the world into the Great Depression. * Acknowledgements and Disclosures * Download Citation (*) MARC ( ) RIS ( ) BibTeKh Download Citation Data Published Versions Eichengreen, Barry and Peter Temin. "The Gold Standard and the Great Depression." Contemporary European History 9, 2 (2000): 183-207. Related Programs Development of the American Economy Monetary Economics More from NBER In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates' latest findings through a range of free periodicals -- the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, and the Bulletin on Health -- as well as online conference reports, video lectures, and interviews. feldsteinlecture2021.JPG The 2021 Martin Feldstein Lecture: The Taxation of Business Income in the Global Economy * Lecture Alan J. Auerbach, the Robert D. 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