Jacques Rueff
| Jacques Rueff link (Economist) | |
|---|---|
| File:Jacques Rueff.png | |
| Born | 23 August 1896 Paris, France |
| Died | 23 April 1978 Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Ethnicity | Jewish |
| Alma mater | lycée Charlemagne, lycée Saint-Louis, Sciences Po |
| Party | Independent |
Mont Pelerin Society economist strongly in favour of European integration. Attended 1958 and 1959 Bilderberg when important economic advisor to President de Gaulle | |
Jacques Léon Rueff was a French economist. Rueff was a major figure in the management of the French economy during the Great Depression, and an important economic advisor to President Charles de Gaulle after 1958, when he attended the 1958 and 1959 Bilderberg meetings. He was strongly in favour of European integration and was from 1952 to 1962 a judge on the European Court of Justice.
Background
An influential French conservative and free market thinker, Rueff was born the son of a well known Parisian physician.
Education
He received his secondary education at the Lycée Charlemagne and the Lycée Saint-Louis, where he was an excellent student. The First World War interrupted his studies. Rueff was integrated into the army as a second lieutenant, then as an artillery lieutenant. In 1917, he was chosen for his mastery of English to become a liaison man with the first division of the American Army setting foot in France.[1]
He studied economics and mathematics at the École Polytechnique and Sciences Po.[2]
Career
In the early 1930s, he was as a financial attache in London, in charge of the Bank of France's sterling reserves.[3] He also worked as an outside expert for the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations, together with Oskar Morgenstern and Bertil Ohlin, supporting the EFO's work on economic depressions in the late 1930s.[4]
He was a member of the Société d'Économie Politique.[5] He also taught at Sciences Po in the 1930s. He was one of the economists who were worried about France's recurring problems in the field of economics. This is partly what led him to be a member of the technocratic Groupe X-Crise and to participate in the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium.
In 1941, Rueff, a Jew, was dismissed from his office as the deputy governor of the Bank of France as a result of Vichy France's new anti-Semitic laws. A decree from Pétain nevertheless authorizedhim to remain within the framework of the Finance Inspectorate.[6] Rueff published several works of political economy and philosophy during his lifetime, including L'Ordre Social, which appeared shortly after the Liberation of Paris.
After the war Rueff became one of the leading French members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society, the president of the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency (IARA), and the minister of state of Monaco. He was strongly in favour of European integration and sat from 1952 to 1962 as a judge on the European Court of Justice.
He advised President Charles de Gaulle from 1958, when he had a preponderant importance in the design of a financial consolidation plan, which was implemented by Antoine Pinay, the Pinay-Rueff plan. Foreseeing the emerging European Community's Common Market, Rueff recommended cutting barriers to competition in his second report. Along with co-writer Louis Armand and helped by an ad hoc committee of experts, the "plan Rueff-Armand", as the press called it, was published in 1960. The full title of the report is "Rapport du Comité pour la suppression des obstacles à l'expansion économique" (Report on suppressing barriers to economic growth).
In the 1960s, Rueff became a major proponent of a return to the gold standard and criticised of the use of the dollar as a unit of reserve, which he warned would cause a worldwide inflation. A member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Rueff was elected to the Académie française in 1964.
Rueff always remained a firm opponent of John Maynard Keynes. His first critique appeared in the Economics Journal, on the issue of transfers; specifically, German war reparations. Rueff was against such transfers in the late 1930s.
In 1947, he critiqued Keynes' magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In 1958, US economist James Tobin became his main critic in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Almost 30 years later, Rueff, repeated his beliefs in "The End of the Keynesian Era", which was first published in Le Monde.
References
- ↑ Gérard Minart et Wolfgang Schäuble, Jacques Rueff: un libéral français, Odile Jacob, coll. « Économie », 2016
- ↑ Alcouffe, Alain; Poettinger, Monika; Schefold, Bertram (2017-01-06). Business Cycles in Economic Thought: A history. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-317-20779-5
- ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2012/07/16/who-is-the-most-important-economist-of-the-20th-century/
- ↑ Louis W. Pauly (December 1996), "The League of Nations and the Foreshadowing of the International Monetary Fund", Essays in International Finance, Princeton University, 201, SSRN 2173443
- ↑ François Denord (2001), "The Origins of Neoliberalism in France: Louis Rougier and the 1938 Walter Lippmann Conference", Le Mouvement Social, 2 (195), retrieved 2017-08-18
- ↑ https://books.openedition.org/igpde/232
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