Didn’t the British losses in WWI cause the pound to lose its power specifically because the cost of war drained their reserves.
That was one of the reasons I say there has never been a true Gold Standard. If truth is the first standard to go in a war then convertibility is the second.
What is the name of the book?
The book is “When Washington Shut Down Wall Street” by Wm Silber, a title which obscures how much it deals with money and banking and how the classical gold standard worked. I think you will find it very interesting.
“Didn’t the British losses in WWI cause the pound to lose its power specifically because the cost of war drained their reserves.”
Their decision to return to pre-war “parity” is something that usually crops up in discussions of why England lost its central role in world finance. The process of returning the Pound to its pre-war value was very deflationary. IIRC Keynes had warned against trying to return to the pre-war value.
So England’s unwise decision to return to parity was part of the reason, but another was the aggressive and ultimately successful move by the Wilson administration to turn the dollar into a major world currency. A lot of the credit for that appears to belong to Wilson’s Treasury Secretary William McAdoo. It seems to be another case of the right man at a propitious time, just like with Alexander Hamilton.