Jacques Rueff
7th Minister of State of Monaco
In office
12 July 1949 – 1 August 1950
MonarchRainier III
Preceded byPierre Blanchy (acting)
Succeeded byPierre Voizard
Personal details
Born
Jacques Léon Rueff

(1896-08-23)23 August 1896
Paris, France
Died23 April 1978(1978-04-23) (aged 81)
Paris, France
Political partyIndependent

Jacques Léon Rueff (23 August 1896 – 23 April 1978) was a French economist and adviser to the French government.

Life

An influential French conservative and free market thinker, Rueff was born the son of a well known Parisian physician and studied economics and mathematics at the École Polytechnique. An important economic advisor to President Charles de Gaulle, Rueff was also a major figure in the management of the French economy during the Great Depression. In the early 1930s, he was as a financial attache in London, in charge of the Bank of France's sterling reserves.[1] 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.[2]: 29 

He was a member of the Société d'Économie Politique and was linked to the Éditions de Médicis.[3] He also taught at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in the 1930s.

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. 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 served from 1952 to 1962 as a judge on the European Court of Justice.

He advised President Charles de Gaulle from 1958. That year, the Rueff Plan, also known as the Rueff-Pinay Plan, balanced the budget and secured the convertibility of the franc, which had been endangered by the strains of decolonisation.

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. 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).

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.

Bibliography

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Articles in journals

  • "L'assurance-chômage, cause du chômage permanent". Revue d'économie politique (in French). Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey. XLV: 211–251. January–February 1931. Retrieved 19 May 2012.
  • Rueff, Jacques (1929). "Les idées de M. Keynes sur le problème des transferts". Revue d'économie politique (in French). Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey. XLIII: 1067–1081. Retrieved 19 May 2012.
  • Rueff, Jacques (May 1947). "The Fallacies of Lord Keynes General Theory". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LXI (3): 343–367. doi:10.2307/1879560. JSTOR 1879560.
  • Rueff, Jacques (November 1948). "The Fallacies of Lord Keynes' General Theory: Reply". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LXII (5): 771–782. doi:10.2307/1883471. JSTOR 1883471.
  • Tobin, James (November 1948). "The Fallacies of Lord Keynes' General Theory: Comment". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LXII (5): 763–770. doi:10.2307/1883470. JSTOR 1883470.

Books

Reports

See also

References

  1. ↑ Benko, Ralph (16 July 2012). "Who Is The Most Important Economist Of The 20th Century?". Forbes. Retrieved 19 August 2014.
  2. ↑ 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
  3. ↑ François Denord (2001), "The Origins of Neoliberalism in France: Louis Rougier and the 1938 Walter Lippmann Conference", Le Mouvement Social, 2 (195), retrieved 18 August 2017
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