Officer begins this book with a historical perspective of the monetary standards of the United States and Britain. He then develops data on exchange rates, mint parity and gold points, with which he investigates three important features of Anglo-American monetary history. First, the integration of the American foreign-exchange market over time. Second, it is proved that gold-point arbitrage is markedly more efficient than either interest arbitrage or forward speculation. Third, regime efficiency is explored from standpoints of both private agents and policy-makers; the 1925–1931 gold standard, though less durable than the pre-war standard, is nevertheless shown to be surprisingly stable. The book will serve as a Dollar-Sterling handbook for those interested in this important aspect of international monetary history.

‘Students of Dollar-Sterling exchange rates will find this book to be a superb US-British financial history of the period 1791–1931 as well as an original statistical and analytic study of how the gold standard worked.’

Anna J. Schwartz - National Bureau of Economic Research

‘… the book is a beautiful example of the best kind of analysis of market micro-structure, and deserves to be on the shelves of any serious student of the history of the dollar-sterling exchange rate.’

Source: The Economic Journal