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International Monetary Relations: Theory, History, and Policy
CFS Reissues Leland Yeager’s International Monetary Relations The Center for Financial Stability is pleased to reissue Leland B. Yeager’s masterly International Monetary Relations: Theory, History, and Policy. First published in 1966, it appeared in a second edition in 1976, which has long been out of print. We are making the second edition available in an inexpensive electronic edition on Amazon Kindle, as well as posting a scan of the print version. Leland Yeager (1924-2018) was a prominent economist of the 20th century. He spent most of his career at the University of Virginia and Auburn University. At Virginia, he was by common consent the best teacher in the economics department—a powerhouse that had two future winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, James Buchanan and Ronald Coase. In an appreciation titled “The Yeager Mystique,” one of his former students said of his classroom lectures, “This stuff was dynamite. Students quickly realized that Yeager had it all and anyone with half a brain knew they had a once in a lifetime chance to wrap up the whole damn subject—if they could just get every word he uttered written down.” (Remember, it was decades before digital recording devices.) International Monetary Relations was where Yeager wrote it down himself for the benefit of an audience beyond the classroom. The book was marketed as a graduate-level textbook. It succeeds amply on that level, but because Yeager was a clear writer it should also be accessible to a wider audience, for readers willing to devote serious attention to it. Unlike most textbooks, it is also a treatise that advanced the frontiers of its subject. When the print edition appeared, eminent authorities acknowledged it as worthy of study by themselves as well as by students. As the book’s subtitle indicates, it combines theory, history, and policy. Yeager’s mastery of all three strands makes the book useful in a way unlike recent graduate texts on the subject, which focus on theory and make little effort to use it to illuminate history or to apply it to policy. The book remains worth reading for its content, for its lucid handling of the subject, and for its deft application of theory to history and policy. We thank the executors of Professor Yeager’s estate, Luis Dopico and Glenn Edwards, for permission to reissue the book. |
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