Duncan Needham (Faculty of History) presenting.
Title: From Keynesian consensus to 'sado-monetarism': UK monetary policy from devaluation to Mrs Thatcher
Abstract: This presentation will chart the course of UK monetary policy from the Keynesian consensus of the 1960s to the 'sado-monetarism' of the first Thatcher administration. This is a period which included the collapse of Bretton Woods, stagflation, the oil shocks, the 1976 IMF loan and the winter of discontent. It will show that Bank of England and Treasury opposition to the monetarism of the first Thatcher administration stemmed partly from a belief in the intellectual incoherence of the theory, but also from the failure of an earlier experiment in 'practical monetarism', Competition and Credit Control, in the early 1970s.