Charles Rist

Nationality

France

Date of Birth

1874

Date of Death

1955

Political
Preference

Charles Rist was a prominent French economist, specializing in monetary theory. He believed that sound economic policy was to be founded on an equilibrium between internal prices, external prices, the circulation of money, the balance of payments (i.e. international trade) and fiscal policy.

In the 1920s, Rist advocated for the stabilization of the Franc currency, which led him to be nominated into a committee of experts in France to discuss and advise on this issue. He later worked for the Bank of France. Rist represented France at the Lausanne Conference in 1932, a meeting between Germany, France and the United Kingdom that resulted in an agreement to suspend World War I reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. He went on to be the French delegate to several conferences and meetings on financial questions, especially gold standards, in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1930s he was also the director of the Institut scientifique de recherche économique et sociale.

After World War II, he was critical of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), because he considered it to aim for an Anglo-American monetary structure, rather than an international restoration of currencies (and convertibility between them). He also opposed Jean Monnet’s post-war economic plan of the modernization of French industry, as it would inflict heavy budgetary charges under the pretext of investment and modernization and worried about its impact on the Franc (i.e. due to inflation). Rist participated in the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) on behalf of the French government, where he advised on questions of international trade and payments.