Dear all,

Next Wednesday, on January 22nd, Luca Fantacci will be presenting at the HPPE seminar on the topic "Commodities and Currencies: Keynes's Postwar Plans for a Global Economic Order".
The seminar takes place in the East Building EAS.E168 at 1 p.m. at the London School of Economics. Everyone is welcome.

Abstract:
In recent years, unprecedented fluctuations in commodity prices have been a growing cause of uncertainty, distress and political tensions. Similar problems characterized the turbulent interwar period. In his broad design for a postwar economic order, Keynes proposed an international organization to stabilize prices of foodstuffs and raw materials by managing buffer stocks. This presentation traces the story of Keynes’s commodity plan, from the genesis to the eventual demise. It shows how the scheme was conceived as a complement to Keynes’s plan for a new international currency: together, they were intended to promote accumulation of wealth in the form of real commodities rather than financial assets. Today, Keynes’s proposal remains an inspiration to reform international economic institutions – along ‘a middle course between unfettered competition and planned controls’ – with a view to contrasting global imbalances, financial distress and price volatility of commodities, on which the nutrition and livelihood of entire populations depend.

About the presenter:

Luca Fantacci teaches international economics and the history of financial crises at Bocconi University in Milan. His research focuses on the history of financial systems and of economic thought. Inspired by Keynes’s ideas, Fantacci is working on clearing schemes, both at European and at local level, aimed at facilitating what the crisis has shown to be systemically obstructed: the payment of debts and the circulation of money. He is the co-editor of Money and Calculation (Palgrave  2010) and the author, together with Massimo Amato, of The End of Finance (Polity 2011) and Saving the Market from Capitalism (forthcoming Polity 2014).

The programme for the rest of the seminar is:
18 February
Steve Medema (Department of Economics, University of Colorado Denver)
“The World(s) in the Model(s): The Coase Theorem in the Long Run”

26 February
Esther Sahle (Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science)
t.b.c.

12 March
Tony Lawson (Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge)
t.b.c.

Best wishes,
Gerardo Serra and Raphaelle Schwarzberg

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