Gold Standard
Further information: Gold StandardFrom about 1921, Britain had started a slow economic recovery from the war and the subsequent slump. But in April 1925, the Conservative Chancellor, Winston Churchill, on advice from the Bank of England, restored the Pound Sterling to the gold standard at its prewar exchange rate of $4.86 US dollars to one pound. This made the pound convertible to its value in gold, but at a level that made British exports more expensive on world markets. The economic recovery was immediately slowed. To offset the effects of the high exchange rate, the export industries tried to cut costs by lowering workers' wages.
The industrial areas spent the rest of the 1920s in recession, and these industries received little investment or modernisation. Throughout the 1920s, unemployment stayed at a steady one million.
Read more about this topic: Great Depression In The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words gold and/or standard:
“Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)