Jacques Rueff

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Jacques Rueff (August 23, 1896 - April 23, 1978) was a French economist and adviser to the French Government.

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 French President Charles de Gaulle, Rueff was also a major figure in the management of the French economy during the Great Depression. In 1941 Rueff was dismissed from his office as the deputy governor of the Bank of France as a result of the Vichy regime'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 Liberation.

After the war Rueff became one of the leading French members of the conservative Mont Pelerin Society, the president of the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency (IARA), and the minister of state of Monaco. Rueff was strongly in favour of European integration and served from 1952 to 1962 as a judge on the European High Court of Justice. He advised General de Gaulle after de Gaulle became French President in 1958. The 1958 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 decolonization. In the 1960s, Rueff beame a major proponent of a return to the gold standard and critical 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.