The Politics of International Monetary Reform-The Exchange Crisis; Floating Exchange Rates-The Lessons of Recent Experience

"How we got here" and "where we are" might be the titles for these helpful books. Brenner, a political scientist, deploys all the latest fashions in terms and catchwords but then settles down to a valuable analytic history of how government officials and central bankers coped with the troubles of the early 1970s. He stresses short-run views and partial approaches to what became a major change in the system. The largely European contributors to the other volume, many of them bankers and businessmen, discuss the results as of autumn 1974.