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U.S. International Monetary Policy: Markets, Power, and Ideas as Sources of Change. By John S. Odell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Pp. xvi, 385. $35.00

There is probably no subject about which more nonsense has been written than international monetary relations. So when a book is published on the subject, one grabs it eagerly and reads it carefully. This book is not a disappointment. John Odell has set himself the useful task of providing a "new interdisciplinary framework" for understanding foreign economic policy changes. His new framework argues that ideas, not domestic and bureaucratic politics, shaped American policy actions during three controversial periods that transformed the postwar international monetary system. The first period, culminating in the 1960s, deals with the American lead to create a new money through the international organization. The second period focuses on the efforts by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of the Treasury John Connally that resulted in America's going off gold unilaterally and forcing dollar depreciation. The third period encompasses the currency crisis of 1972 and 1973, Washington's second devaluation of the dollar, the subsequent collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and its replacement by the current system of managed (or dirty) floating rates. This book, then, is a series of period histories that give an insight into the formation and carrying out of American foreign monetary policy. The period format makes good reading, but the stories have been told before with varying detail. What is the book really about? First, it draws on interviews with many key American decision makers during the period under review. These interviews are interesting in illustrating the role of personalities in policy formation. We learn, for instance, that Secretary of the Treasury Connally had a natural disposition for wage and price controls. He liked to have everything under his control. On the other hand, Secretary George Schultz, his successor, did not and controls were removed. President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger were more or less bored with anything so mundane and complicated as monetary affairs. Second, the author argues, and quite correctly in my view, that ideas are the mainsprings of change. Thus it was that the principal intellectual sources for American international monetary policy were Robert Triffin, whose ideas reached the Secretary of the Treasury in 1965, and Milton Friedman, whose ideas on flexible exchange rates reached the same office in 1972-1973. Neither domestic politics nor the entrenched bureaucracy had much influence in molding policy. Odell presents a sad picture of events and people who participated in policy formation both in the United States and abroad during the era he covers. It must be hoped that the situation was not as bad as he indicates. But he is certainly right that many in high places displayed considerable confidence (and, indeed, arrogance) that made common sense and good judgment fly out the window.