Jacques Rueff

Jacques Léon Rueff (23 August 1896 – 23 April 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 classical liberal 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 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 became 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. Foreseeing the emerging European Community 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", which translates as "Report on suppressing barriers to economic growth".

Rueff always remained a firm opponent of Keynes's ideas. His first critique appeared in the Economics Journal, on the issue of transfers; specifically, German war reparations. Jacques 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, U.S. economist James Tobin became his main critic in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Almost thirty years later, he explained his beliefs once more in "The End of the Keynesian Era", first published in the authoritative French newspaper, Le Monde.

Bibliography

Articles in journals

• "L'assurance-chômage, cause du chômage permanent". Revue d'économie politique (in French) (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey) XLV: 211–251. Janvier-Février 1931. Retrieved 19 May 2012.  Check date values in: |date= (help)
• 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. 
• 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. 
• 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. 

Books

• Chivvis, Christopher S. (2010). The Monetary Conservative: Jacques Rueff and 20^th Century Free Market Thought. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 
• Rueff, Jacques (1972). The Monetary Sin of the West. Translated by Roger Glémet. New York: The Macmillan Company. Retrieved 19 May 2012. 

Reports

• Rueff, Jacques; Armand, Louis (1960). Premier ministre, ed. Les obstacles à l'expansion économique (in French). Rapport présenté par le Comité institué par décret n°59-1284 du 13 novembre 1959. Paris. Retrieved 20 May 2012. 

See also

• List of members of the European Court of Justice

External links

• "Jacques Léon Rueff". Encyclopédie Larousse (in French). Retrieved 19 May 2012. 
• "Jacques RUEFF (1896-1978)". Académie française (in French). Retrieved 19 May 2012. 

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